AC Fourth Grade

Cloth Book Project

What an exciting week we had!

The publishing party with kidsoutandabout went so well. Thank you all for your support and kind words. Debra Ross, the publisher, had times screwed up, so she ended up showing up a little later with Sky Zone. Sky Zone brought enough passes for every student in our Lower School! Hopefully we will be able to get those out on Monday. We are also working on doing a field trip there the last week of school. Here is the link to the results from the 4th grades hard work:
http://rochester.kidsoutandabout.com/content/allendale-columbia-kids-vote-top-20-places-take-kids-greater-rochester

We started off this week with the Cloth Book project. Your kids worked with a partner to develop a book for children in Nicaragua. This took up majority of our mornings on Monday and Tuesday. The books came out beautifully!

We had our last Citizenship Group with Mrs. RC yesterday. Your kids talked a lot more about grit and what it means to have grit and also filled out surveys. They talked more about having self-esteem and how to maintain it when things get hard in school and in their lives.

We collaborated with 3rd grade this week for reading/writing based projects. Here is a link to Mrs. Ellmaker's blog where you can see more about what students did. Next week they will switch to a new teacher and new experience!
https://mrsellmaker.wordpress.com/

Next week we begin our collaboration with Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Costanzo for math. For 3 weeks, we will be doing an exciting new activity or project that is based in math. I'm very excited to collaborate with Mr.Costanzo. He is going to bring math and music together as a hands-on experience with fractions and rhythm for kids!

Next Wednesday, the 4th graders will be teaming up with Upper School kids for various community service projects. They will be traveling with myself, Mrs. Bjorklund or Mrs. Irvine from STEM class to different parts of the city. The group from STEM that did the Ontario Lake project will be going with Mrs. Bjorklund to Corbett's Glen in Penfield to pick up trash, hike, and have lunch. Mrs. Irvine will be taking the swamp group to Thousand Acre swamp to pick up garbage, hike, and have lunch. The other two groups will travel with me to various parks in the area to take measurements and pictures (and clean up) to help Debra Ross with some more information for her site. We will play, eat, and work!

Good afternoon!

I will not complain that it is too hot. I will not! However, now that the weather is getting nicer it is getting much warmer in our classroom. Also, PE is mostly outdoors and there is not enough time between classes for each student to get the amount of water they probably want after running around. Because of this, it would be great to have water bottles around again for students to stay hydrated around Allendale.

This week we counted up our votes for the kid version of "Top 20 Places to Take Kids in Rochester". I think my favorite part about this project was that your children led it in the direction of making sure that the smaller businesses were accounted for. As a result of their efforts to get to know these businesses, write persuasive essays, and create a persuasive piece to share with the lower school, ALL 6 places they chose to highlight came in our top 20. 5 of them made the top 10! For places like Wild Wings, RocVentures, and ArtsRoc - this is amazing news for their business. I placed a phone call to the owner of ArtsRoc this morning and she was ecstatic to hear the news and overjoyed at how much the KIDS care about what she does for them. Our top 5 (Sky Zone, SeaBreeze, Lazer Quest, ArtsRoc, and Darien Lake have all been invited to the publishing party on Friday, May 15th at 12:00.

Next week your kids will collaborate with the 3rd graders and be split into 3 different groups. Each week they will be working an an aspect of reading and/or writing with Mrs. Ellmaker (Readers Theatre), Mrs. Robbins (Chris Van Allsburg author study), and myself (Haiku project). We are very excited to collaborate!

Setting up!

We were exposed and enjoyed a lot of music this week! On Wednesday, 3 students from the Eastman School of Music came to perform for us. They played beautifully and did a great job having the kids picture a character and what that character was like or what he was doing throughout the piece they played for us. The kids had such exciting and wonderful thoughts about "sleepy Sam" - they were truly engaged!

Also, today we were able to enjoy Shrek, performed by the Middle School. They did an amazing job, we LOVED the show!

In addition, Mrs. RC came to talk to us this week about GRIT. She challenged us to think about what it is and how we can use it as a tool to help us throughout our lives. We then created our own GRIT posters with pictures and words of things that help us remember to persevere and stay positive, even when things are hard.

We are moving along in our book club books. Students are really enjoying this round of book club and are having some wonderful discussions about what they are reading.

In writing this week, we enhanced our understanding of persuasive writing by adding arguments about why students should consider the hidden gems we chose to interview. They had to place their arguments in to categories of fact and opinion. We spent a LONG time as a class debating over each fact that a student presented to make sure they got it right!

In math this week we worked hard on multi-step word problems. Students still struggle at times deciding what information is necessary to the problem and what information is not.

Hopefully, the weather begins to match the season soon! Have a wonderful weekend.