Our Week in Review
Highlights from Mrs. Ezzell's Fabulous Fourth Grade
Word Work
Your student will bring home the words they worked with this week in an envelope in their Take Home Folder. Students worked at their level with everything from short and long vowels to determining the meanings of words based on a prefix. One of the sorts they did this week was to draw pictures of several of their words. Ask your student about their words and how they illustrated them.
Reader's Workshop
We continued to create theories about characters this week. We noticed that as you read and learn more about your character, you have to revise or add to your theory. We also made sure our theories were grounded in the text. Together we analyzed the character of Salvador in Sandra Cisnero's Salvador Late or Early. We put our theories into writing, providing text evidence for what we knew about Salvador. Today students read the poem "Swimming to the Rock" independently and crafted their own written response, analyzing the narrator and providing text evidence.
Writer's Workshop
We are knee-deep in the process of writing our fiction stories! This week we have focused on showing versus telling in our writing, and students have been adding dialogue, action, and description to enliven their writing. Instead of telling their readers something like "Sam is a kid who is happy he won his baseball game," they are creating scenes to show this. I am so impressed with the growth we have made as writers this week! Ask your student about their favorite scene they have created in their story.
Science
We are starting our new science unit on ecosystems with a focus on animal adaptations. We have just begun to gather some background knowledge through reading, watching a short video, and notetaking. Students will ultimately be designing their own zoo habitat for an animal and creating a Google Presentation communicating their choices. This week we also created a flip book about regions in Missouri. That assessment will be used along with the Region Smore for the quarter one reporting topics in social studies.
Math
We wrapped up our topic on patterns, took our posttest, and today we took the topic 3 pretest. Topic 3 is all about place value and number sense. On Monday students will record their topic 2 pre and post test scores on a bar graph, so they can reflect on their individual progress. Growth is always our goal! We are tracking pre/post data as a class through a line plot as well. We examine the shape of that data as it moves to the right. The pretest also allows me to identify students who already have a firm grasp of the upcoming content. Those students will work on an enrichment lotus during math, which allows them to work on problems at a more in-depth level.
Leader in Me
We learned more about Habit 2~Plan with the end in mind. We watched a short animation from Sean Covey's The 7 Habits of Happy Kids book, and we worked with partners to identify ways those characters planned (or didn't plan) with the end in mind. The students also identified other habits they saw portrayed in the video. We are really getting good at talking about the habits and finding examples of them!
Specials This Week
Monday—Art
Tuesday—Music
Wednesday—Library/Counselor
Thursday—PE (wear tennis shoes!)
Friday—Art
Upcoming Events
Friday, October 2 5:30 PTA River Roll Skate Night