November 25-29

Grade 4 Weekly Blog

Upcoming events

*December 3- Crazy Sock Day
*December 2-6- please bring canned foods for the food bank

Homework

Social: Interview questions and answers should be completed with sources in google docs. This will be marked on Monday. Please see rubric under Social.

French: Finish your french comic, and create the background, props and people so you can create your stop motion cartoon next week.

We want to say a huge thank you to all the parents who volunteered at our Teacher's Pet where we learned and created our own catapults. You interacted so well with the students. You became our expert and kept the students engaged in the learning! We really appreciate your presence in the classroom.

    

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Thursday was our Celebration of Learning! The students worked together to prepare for this event and did an excellent job. We hope you enjoyed.

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Literacy

This week we focused on writing the script and practicing for our Celebration of Learning. We spent this time working together to create a human number line, create a video about "Why Writer's Write", singing "This Little Light of Mine" and practicing some yoga chanting. As the days passed the students improved to prepare for their performance.

Math

We continued working on our number sense through games, while also continuing to estimate sums before using the "Left to Right" method of adding.

Race to 1500

16 boxes/squares

Activity: Teach your family a math game that we have learned in class.

We worked on the strategy of adding numbers from left to right. This shows that students recognize the importance of place value by adding first all the thousands, then hundreds, then tens and finally the ones. It is important to learn a variety of strategies when adding and subtracting and then choosing the strategy they are most comfortable with to complete assignments.

        

Social Studies:
We continued working on building our Social Studies geography vocabulary and google slide presentations. Some students have not completed their interview questions and interviewing family yet. W have had class time since Nov 12 to work on the questions and to upload them on google docs. The interviewing was due this past Monday so they could use class time to create their "My Alberta" slide shows. The Interview questions of the rubric below will be marked Monday:

Question: How did you find each out what each type of geography is in the textbook? How does learning about geography help us make connections to how people live lived in certain regions?

French and technology

This week students were very excited to create French comics that shows various emotions. Students learned emotion words last week and used them in their comics this week. We are using our comics to create "STOP MOTION" videos. Students are using construction paper to create their characters and setting for their projects. Next week we will be learning how to use the iPads to create their "STOP MOTION" comics.

  


 

Question: What is the plot of your comic? What French emotion words did you include in your comic? 

November 18-21

Grade 4 Weekly Blog

We want to say a huge thank you to all the parents and guardians that came to see us for conferences. Discussing your child's learning face to face gives us the chance to celebrate all the hard work they are doing. It also allows us the time to explain thoroughly what challenges they face and provide strategies to help them overcome them.

Upcoming events
-Teachers Pet Tuesday at 1pm: Volunteers still needed
-Fun lunch Wednesday -Pita Basket

- Grade 4 Assembly Thursday, November 28 at 3:00pm

Homework

*We will not be having a spelling test for the next few weeks as we are focusing on our "Writer's Workshop"
Social: Finish your My Alberta Interview
French: Finish your french comic
Art: Finish your Rocky Mountain Pastel

Literacy

Dress up as your favorite Story Book Character

This week we began our "Writers's Workshop!" After discussing the various reasons why writer's write, we always came back to the fact that writer's write for a reader. We are going to be learning how to write interested stories by focusing on the following:

- Character development

- Creating a setting that creates a vivid image for the reader

- A problem that engages the reader and then wants to read on

- Various attempts and fails to solve the problem

- A solution that satisfies the reader

- A conclusion where the characters learn a lesson from their experience

They are using folders for this unit so if they need to take home some writing to keep up with the class pace they will be bringing home their "Writer's Workshop" folder.

Students created a "Heart Map" which contains all things they are passionate about and would like to write a story about. This is a brainstorming technique to avoid "Writer's Block".

  

Students used ideas from their brainstorming sheet to create 4 story ideas with a problem.

 

Students chose one of these story ideas to write for 20 minutes of uninterrupted speed writing.

     

Math

Can you estimate numbers to the nearest 10 or 100 or 1000? Looking at the number 351- when rounding to the nearest hundred do you round up or down? Explain to someone in your family the rule for rounding numbers.

HINT- 5 is the most important number.

Using a number line can help with estimating. Knowing your number facts is also important. Activity: Continue to play these games to develop your number sense.

Make Ten (or ?)

16 Boxes

Social Studies

Students have now written their interview questions for "MY ALBERTA" which can be found in their google docs account. This can be logged in and accessed at home for them to conduct their interview with the person they chose. Our focus is to find out as much as we can about your families and how you have been and are connected to Alberta. Some sample questions include:

1. Where did our ancestors come from? What culture/traditions did we bring?
2.How long have you lived in Alberta?

3. How far back does our ancestry connect to Alberta?

4. What cities and places have you visited?

5. Do you have a favourite or special place in Alberta that has become a family tradition?
6. What stories do we have to share about our family history?

Homework- please make sure you have finished your interview so you can start your google slides presentation this week. If you already started did you think of other questions that you would like to include in your presentation?

We learned to use features of our textbook to look up Geography. 

Question: How does this exercise help us with our study of Alberta and learning in general?

French

This week we expanded our repertoire of answers to Comment Ca va?

Question: Comment Ca va?

We created a comic strip which will be turned into a stop motion cartoon. The comic has to include at least one emotion expression and at least one subject we have covered in french For example: numbers (les nombres), colors (les couleurs), food (Je mange)..., Fall-(en automne), weather-(Quel temp fait-itl?), playing games(les jou), birthdays(bon anniversaire), Halloween (C'est Haloween), What do you do? (Que-ce que tu fait?)

Question: What is your comic about?

November 12-15

ROOM18/19 Weekly Blog

Upcoming Events
*Wednesday, November 20-Dress up as your favorite fictional character

* Thursday, November 21st- Student Led Conferences 4:30-8:00pm

* Friday, November 22nd- Student Led Conferences 8:00am-1:00pm
* Tuesday November 26th- 1:15pm-3:15pm-  In-school field trip "Teacher's Pet". If you are able to volunteer in the classroom for this, please let us know. Please pay the fee of $14.75 on line or bring the money to school. Thanks!!!

Homework

Author Study-please make sure you have finished, shared and saved under shared folders=>your name=>literacy
Writing-Write in your favorite style (ex. stories, comics, non-fiction paragraphs, journal writing...) and edit using your editing guide sheet
Word Work- Study words for Monday's "Show What You Know." This week we focused on the the "ight" word family.
Social- Finish writing your interview questions in your google drive and start asking your family your questions

Literacy
Students focused on editing their writing this week. They were each provided a guide which focuses on checking punctuation, grammar, spelling and sentence structure. Using pencil crayon they were able to identify some mistakes by reading their work to themselves aloud and then independently making the corrections.

This week our spelling focus was "ight" words. Students worked on alphabetizing their word list which was very challenging to some. We will continue to work towards building the skill to put lists in alphabetical order to better improve our dictionary skills.

Math and French

This week we continued to use number lines for estimating addition and adding and subtracting numbers in the hundreds and thousands. 
We went from 0-100, 0-1000, and finally 0-10 000!

Question: How can we use our number line to estimate the sum of 189+420? Try it!

We played a game with adding thousands from 0 to get to 10 000 and subtracting thousands from 10 000 to get to zero. The last roll has to get you exactly to zero! Keep rolling until you get the number needed!

We integrated french by using some french vocabulary while playing the game!

Remember: un mille, deux mille, trois mille, quatre mille, cinq mille, six mille, sept mille, huit mille,  neuf mille, dix mille!

Activity: Vas-y! (Go!) Now teach your parents and play! Bravo!


On Thursday the students wrote a test that is intended as a math intervention/programming instrument. This shows us where the students need most support in the stems that we report on their report card (number sense, statistics and probability, patterns and relations and shape and space). We talked about how this is not something that students will be graded on and that it is simply a tool we use to find out what areas need most support to move learning forward.

Social Studies

The students worked on interview questions for "My Alberta" either on paper or on google docs. They also learned how to save on a shared folder that will contain all of their work this year. 


We talked about what types of questions they can ask their family which will give them them the answers they need to create a presentation of "My Alberta" which meets the following outcome: I can appreciate how an understanding of Alberta’s history, peoples and stories contributes to their own sense of belonging and identity:

Art

To introduce the Rocky Mountains as one of Alberta's 6 geographical regions, we completed a Ted Harrison inspired Art Project. Come in and check them out next week during conferences. The students put in a lot of time and effort to create a beautiful oil pastel picture.