So, Here We Are!

Pecos Bill riding a tornado?

         Greetings!  Here are some things we have done this past week in 4/5 B.    Our Literature Circles are going full force as we study settings and conflicts using a  “middle ages” theme.  Students are reading assigned pages both in or out of the book groups they are in.  They are also recording information about the various settings in the book as described by the author, and writing down their own ideas of what the setting looks like.  At the end of the Lit Circle each group will present a chart showing cause and effect possibilities as they relate to the settings.   Our Writing these last two weeks have been focused on the study of  Tall Tales.  We have explored them prior to last week, and now the students are writing their own original tall tale.  They will record these either in audio or video mode. Then we will place them on our newsletter site for you to hear.  At least that is the plan....  We are also working in our Spellography groups twice a week looking at basic spelling patterns, sounds, syllables, and irregular rules for spelling.

Out 4th grade math unit is coming to an end, probably this current week.  We have been working on geometrical concepts involving angles, shapes, and many concepts about polygons.  There are over 30 vocabulary words for this unit!

Over the next few weeks in Science we will be working on experimental procedure and using the tools of science.  Last week I introduced the class to the scientific method, and we watched a video which went over the procedures for an experiment.  On Friday we did a series of investigations using some of the tools.  The students measured temperatures in Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees with thermometers, liquid volume in cubic centimeters/milliliter using graduated cylinders, mesuring time using stopwatches, and metric rulers to measure linear distance to get more comfortable to using the metric system.   They also worked with triple beam balances to measure objects in grams or tenths of a gram. 

    Our last Social Studies unit, which was taught by Ms. Deb, ended as well.  The focus on the unit was the life of Martin Luther King, his work on fairness and justice for all people, and what segregation really is about.  The students were engaged and were able to really get into the concepts she presented.

    That is about it for now!   Oh yes, one last thing.  Ms Deb will be doing her solo teaching starting next week, February 4th until Friday the 15th.  I will be nearby, but she will run the classroom all by herself.  I’m sure all will go well for both the class and Ms. Deb! 


Thanks,  Mr. B and Ms. Deb

   

And the New Year Begins!

   Since we have returned from the break, we have been involved in a multitude of studies and events.  We have bid a fare adieu to our Thai intern Kru Beau.  We have started the Winter Sports Program.  And the first Progress Reports for 3-4-5 will be coming home this Wednesday.  Last but not least.....we had a Putney Paws Card ice cream sundae party celebrating our classroom’s success at getting over 1,000 PAWS cards since the beginning of school!  Read on for more classroom content!

    Our Language Arts/Literature block for the next 3 weeks is focused on setting and how it may change a character’s actions and their conflicts.  We are working with Karen Saunders’ Grade 5 class reading various books based in the past.  The students are responsibe for reading a set amount of pages each evening and then collecting information for the group discussions. 
    We have also been doing a mini-unit on Tall Tales.  We watched a few animated Tall Tales, read a few, and have practiced using exaggerations, similes and metaphors.  We are now working on creating original tall tales that we will record digitally to share with others within the school.  Some of the students will illustrate their tall tales as well.
    Much of the writing since the break has focused on completing the Taino report for Social Studies.  We continue to work on paragraphing, proofreading, and focusing on the topic at hand.

    Ms. Deb’s 4th grade mathematics unit is currently about 2D Geometry.  We are working to finish the unit up over the next week or two.   The students are learning about angles, shapes, making connections about what polygons are, what quadrilaterals are, and using Power Polygons to help in this endeavor.  There is also some review of computation along the way.

    Ms. Deb is conducting a Social Studies mini-unit about celebrating Martin Luther King’s legacy and the rights of all people.  The students’ are  learning about and bringing up many good ideas about fairness and people’s rights. 

    We will start a new Science unit soon, and very soon Ms. Deb will do her solo teaching.  She will complete two full weeks on her own, and I will be “around” but more out of the picture working on other things.  However, I will be in touch by email if necessary. 

    Enjoy the new snow and the weekend.


    Mr. B and Ms. Deb

   

 

So, Time to have a Happy Holiday!

     Murray, our family dog, begged and pleaded to wish you all a happy holidays.  Well, as you might have expected, I gave in to his constant whining and barking, but told him he would have to type the message himself and smile for the camera.  He did well, don't you think? 
        So on the eve of our holiday break, Ms. Deb and I wanted to wish you all a happy holidays.  When we return after the break, we have many things to do and lots more to learn.  Ms. Deb will be doing a two week "solo" performance in the classroom sometime in the near future.  She is very excited for that and for being able to work with our classroom this year.  I'm sure you are hearing great things about her teaching and lessons so far.  She truly has a way with the kids!  In fact, maybe you would like to hear about a few of the things we all have been doing lately.  Well, read on!

    We have started a new 4th grade unit on geometry which will continue after the break.  The students were able to solve a Christmas lights problem about perimeter and symmetry, and actually used the lights for real.  They have been measuring perimeters, looking at symmetry, and reviewing measurement in general.

    Our class has also been doing a unit on the Taino.  Part of that unit involves writing a report on these people and their culture.  The class has also been working on weaving using grass strips. 

   Conor was the "expert" in twisting and creating string out of the grass strips so he showed us the way he had learned.   Some students also created their own way connecting two or three grass strips together.  

   We have also started a writing blog on kidblog.org.  Each student has a blog in their own name that they can access from home as well as the classroom.  We started off by getting used to working in the blog by signing in and then writing about a picture I had posted.  They had to listen to a video of directions
I made as well before they started.  I plan on bringing more technology into their learning after the break.  Speaking of which, they love working with the Starboard!  We do many math activities and some language arts, especially Wacky Web Tales.
      We completed our work on Ecosystems with an assessment last week.  The students had to create an information poster or written paper about what they had learned during the unit about 3-5 of the biomes.  They did a nice job on this!
      And of course we just completed our Reading for Information study groups.  The students created posters in their small groups.  We then went around today and read the poster information to answer questions for a "scavenger hunt" of sorts.  Nice work on the posters and in the groups by all!

    Well, this seems like a good place to stop for this year....see you next year after the holiday break!  

                 Mr. B and Ms. Deb!

My Thoughts

      There are not too many ways to say how sorry we are for the tragedy in Newtown, CT.  I can't imagine the feelings of loss of the families whose children were at the school that day as we approach the holiday season.  Or the families of the staff members who went to school that day and........    While we will move on with our lives here in Putney and PCS, where do these families move on to?  How can I as a teacher ever try to explain to our class about an incident like this?  How shall we process this Monday morning.......How can we say we are "safe" at school?   We will do what we can.  I hope each of our families has tried to dicuss this to their children in some way already, and that as our class returns to our routines this week we remember how lucky we are, but also how fragile life is and that every day should be treated as special.  Everything we think is a "big" problem......is it really?  Does it even compare at all to that day? 
    So I can only say that we will try to move on as best we can, but hope we can help out in some way as well.  And that is what we shall talk about.  How can we help?

Thai Festival, and more...

Bailey and her kratong

4/5 students with kratongs and Thai apparel

Greetings, and how about some of these pictures!  We celebrated Loy Kratong, a Thai Festival the other week.  The students were able to wear traditional Thai clothing and demonstrated a Thai game during the assembly here at PCS.  They created models of kratongs to place on the "river" in the large room we met in.   Our Thai intern Kru Beau performed a dance as well.  It was a lot of fun!  In other news, the Holiday Bazaar was held this past Friday, and the Winter Concerts are this Wednesday and Thursday.  Also, this coming Friday is the Holiday Lunch.  Our 4/5B class and Ms. Saunder's G5 class will be eating at 11:15 or so......which is the earlier lunch.  This helps Kari in the kitchen get all the food put together for all the lunches.  She thanks us profusely!

Ms. Deb and the gang

The lovely Kru Beau in Traditional dress

Our own Maggie with her kratong

    Meanwhile, back in the classroom,  the 4/5 B students have been working on their new Study Groups during Lit Circle time.  We have divided up into 7 mixed groups of students from the 3-4-5 team classrooms.  For the next few weeks we are delving into the world of non-fiction text.  Each group is reading a book about the ecosystem/animal habitats theme.  We are using various strategies to collect important information.  The theme will close with an information poster scavenger hunt activity. 
      Technology and writing work have finally been connected as the 4/5B students now have Google Doc accounts to do their writing in.  We have just finished setting these up, and they should be available from home as well.   Their work is password protected and allows the students to access their writing from any computer.  
      Our Science unit on Biomes and Ecosystems is winding down now and the class is finishing up their final assessment project as I speak...oh, write....ok, type.  Theye were asked to create a poster of as much info as they could about plants and animals, climate and weather, adaptations, and overall description of 3 different biomes.  They are coming out very well. 
      Ms. Deb continues her unit on the Taino culture.  The students are learning more about the Taino lifestyle of the past and present, their language, and what life was like all these years after Columbus made his voyages to our end of the world.
      We are finishing up our third unit in 4th grade math, and will begin the next unit on 2Dimensional Geometry concepts.  Students will still need to practice their multiplication and division computation strategies and combinations as we continue through the year.
  
      Ok, I suspect that is a fair assessment of what we have been doing in the classroom.  Hope the weekend went well and see you all on Monday!
   
                                                       Mr. B and Ms. Deb
      

Happy Thanksgiving!

         Greetings and Happy Thanksgiving!  Of course it is now the day after the big T-Day, but the memory lives on, right?  So here we are smack dab in the middle of the holiday season.  Amazing to me to have already seen Christmas decorations even two weeks ago in some places.  Doesn't everyone know we have school to do?  Speaking of which,  hope your break is going well.  Here are a few things we have been doing in class. 
         We have completed our Lit Circles about finding conflict (like that is very hard anymore), the students did a fantastic job on their brief presentations, and we will be starting a new Lit Circle this week.  We are going to focus on non-fiction information and ideas.  More to come on that this week coming up. 
         We have been working on spelling two times a week using the Spellography series as our guide.  Students will be working with word patterns and reviewing many different spellings of the many sounds we use in our language over the course of this year.  While we will not have weekly spelling tests, there will be written check-ins along the way for the different spelling patterns.  We have been writing about Our Special Place in Writing class, and the students have been doing very well regarding this topic.  I have also set up Google Accounts specific to our school for their writing to be filed.  They will be able to access this from any computer in the school with their username and password. 
          The Fourth Grade Mathematicians has been working on multiplication and division using multiple towers.  We are working with multiples of tens to increase our efficiency of multiplying and dividing.  I hope to move this unit along as some of the concepts are similar to our first unit this year and build on these.   One thing that is very important is for your child to continue to work on their multiplication combinations fluency.  This remains very important!  Also, please check in with Karen for information on the 5th Grade Mathematicians. 

          Social Studies class continues to include Thai culture and activities, mapping and civilization studies, and soon we will be doing a unit on an indigenous people, the Taino.

   Our studies in Science will begin to wrap up the Biomes and Ecosystems unit.  Students have been busy exploring the differences between the different biomes that we are covering, working in cooperative groups and preparing posters and information charts with their assigned biomes. We also had our Four Winds program last week.  Some fun times with cones and the Fibbonacci principle.  Check out some of the pictures!

          So, that probably is a good overview of our work over the last two weeks or so. As always, it is a pleasure to work with your children and I enjoyed the conference times we have had.  Still a fe more to get in there as well.  

Thanks from us,  Mr. B and Ms Deb.

Greetings from 4/5 B again!
      At the present time, we are currently in between Halloween and Thanksgiving break.  We are also ending our first Literature Circle this coming Tuesday.  As I may have mentioned in a previous post, our Lit Circle focused on "conflict" in the main character or "protagonist".  As the students read their assigned pages, they looked for examples of conflicts in their chosen books.  We then discussed these and other topics in our small groups during the 3 weeks we did this.  The final project is to do a "Reader's Theater" in which the students read selections from their stories to all the lit circle group.  Their selections, in this case, illustrate the conflicts seen in those particular selections.
     Our Writing sessions these past two weeks have been about "special places".  We started with choosing a special place that means something to the students, then choose three "special moments" that occurred in that special place.  From there each student has to create an idea map which allows them to organize all the pieces they remember about that moment.  They will then start the actual writing process involving sentences, paragraphing, and proofreading.  We continue with these pieces next week.  We are also working on basic spelling patterns twice a week in groupings according to what needs to be learned.
     4th grade math class has completed the Data Unit, did the final unit assessment, and will move into Unit 3:  Multiplication and Division 2.  We will investigate methods beyond the typical algorithm for double digit multiplication and division.  Lots of interesting math computation in the unit.  5th grade math has also been involved in a unit on multiplication and division, as well as geometry and volume.
     Science classes about biomes and ecosystems continue this week.  The students have been working on biome mapping on large poster paper.  Each group had a biome to investigate by first reading an information sheet,  and then creating a content map about their biome.  Each group created 5 questions about their biomes that all the others will have to complete as well.
      Social Studies has been split between Kru Beau's lessons about Thailand, and Ms. Deb's mapping and Columbus activities.  Kru Beau has taught us Thai numbers, writing our names in Thai, and many other interesting things about her homeland.  (Check out the cool picture at the top of this post!)  Ms. Deb has taught us about mapping the world, and language areas in the Western Hemisphere that were specific to the early explorers.  The students are currently completing map outlines showing where the many countries of the America's are located, and what the predominant languages are and why.
      So hopefully you have all received a conference notice as we are right in the middle of them.  I have a few more to schedule so I'm sure you will not be missed. 

             See you soon!     Mr. B and Ms. Deb