Week of September 17th

Learning Skills Posters

After compiling lists to define each of the 6 learning skills, students worked in groups to create posters for our classroom. Using cut out letters from magazines, they cooperatively and creatively designed some really great posters! Students used great problem solving skills when they were unable and challenged to find certain letters in the magazines. One group decided to turn the letter N on its side and use it as a Z. 

Organization

Collaboration

Self-Regulation

Responsibility

Initiative

Independence

Language

This week we began discussing the reading strategy of summarizing. The class was read a book called What Should Danny Do? As a whole group we used a graphic organizer to outline what the important parts of the story were. We broke the book apart in to 5 parts using the "Someone, Wanted, But, So, Then" method. The class was super excited to call this "SWBST"! We also discovered that by using "The Five W's" (Who, What, Where, When, Why), it would ensure we had all the relevant information for our summary. After organizing the most important parts, we took our brainstorm ideas and turned them in to a completed summary paragraph. 

Later in the week, we read the book Sam's Pet Temper. This time students worked in partners using the "SWBST" graphic organizer to write up their summaries collaboratively. 

Media Literacy 

Sticking with our theme of Learning Skills, students used the iPads and Chromebooks to create advertisements. We discussed the important features of an effective advertisement (i.e. font size, font colour, layout, organization). 

Below are a few of the advertisements the class created:

Art

This week we explored colour in art. We discussed topics such as the colour wheel, warm vs. cool colours and colour mixing. We tested out an alternative to water colour painting, where students used watercolour paper, a plastic bag, markers and a spray bottle filled with water. Last week we created our classroom agreement of what we wanted our class to look like, sound like and feel like this year. We condensed the list down to 25 things and each student created their own art piece. 

 

Math 

This week we focused on strategies used for adding using mental math. We discussed the importance of estimating and when it is and isn't an effective strategy. We all agreed that I shouldn't estimate the number of students in the class if I was bringing in treats...just incase my estimate was too low! 

Students were introduced to the acronym of "RICE" when solving math problems:

We also reviewed this rhyme for rounding:

We will continue to practice rounding to the nearest ten, hundred and thousand next week.

First 2 weeks of Grade 4

Grade 4 in Portable 1!

Our first 2 weeks in Grade 4 have been super busy and extremely fun! We are all getting to know each other and are off to a great start!

Spaghetti and Marshmallow Challenge
On the first day of school, students were challenged to work in groups to create the tallest free standing structure using 20 sticks of spaghetti, a meter of string and a meter of tape. The goal was to have the marshmallow on the top.

 

 

 
























Chromebooks
Students have been exploring a variety of activities using the classroom Chromebooks. We started off by adding our birthdays to a shared google doc. We quickly learned what worked and what didn't work when 25 people were trying to edit the same document at the same time! Their next challenge was to learn how to insert pictures. Students each had their own copy of a bingo template and they all participated in Bingo Selfie. 

Math
We have started the year off learning about Place Value and Comparing and Ordering numbers. Students have been using a variety of techniques to display their learning such as Base Ten Blocks, Chromebooks and whiteboards. 

Art
We completed our first art activity this week. We discussed what abstract art is and then students created their own piece of abstract art by following instructions based on the outcome of rolling dice. 

Learning Skills
This week the class reviewed what they knew about Learning Skills. We first discussed as a group some examples of each Learning Skill. Next, students worked in small groups to brainstorm specific behaviours to represent each Learning Skill. We condensed all our ideas and will be creating posters next week.