Kenneth D Taylor - Grade 4 - Miss. Willis

Thank you to everyone who came out last week for Student-Led Conferences.  It was great to chat with you and to listen as your child took you through their learning. Coming up this week ... Humanities For the next little while we will be focusing on persuasive essay writing.  Students have used the book "Hey Little Ant" as a starting off point, and had to choose whether or not they would let the ant get squished or let the ant go free.  We have talked about fact and opinion, and how it is important to have facts that back up your opinion when you are trying to be persuasive.  To assist with this, students did some research into ants and compiled their information into a "Persuasion Map".  They are now using the Map to write their initial essay.  Here is the checklist that students were given to refer to during writing: Persuasive Writing Checklist Introduction: Did you … Start with a hook to grab the reader’s interest? Identify the top...

After our adventures last week, we are very grateful to be back in our classroom!  During the cold snap, the furnace for our room completely froze up (there was about an inch of ice on the pipes!) and Miss. Willis could see her breath when she opened the door on Thursday morning.  Luckily the Learning Commons was a warm and cozy space, and the only ones that didn't escape the cold quite in time were the poor classroom plants :(. Here is the web from last week that we used to help write our Home Journals.  If you haven't had a chance to take a look, please do so as soon as possible, sign, and return to school with your child (we will need them again this coming Friday): We have started to look at perimeter and area with a math project in which students get to design their own zoo.  To practice these concepts, we did a 3-Act Problem called "Cover the Floor".  Students used a model to construct an array, and then used either addition or multiplication to s...

Happy NewYear and Welcome Back!! I hope that you had a relaxing, restful, and warm break :). We have jumped right into things in our first two days back. In Language Arts we are finishing up our autobiographies.  Students have been doing self-editing and peer-editing for the beginning, middle, and ending.  The last step is a teacher edit, and then students will be able to publish their work, either by typing it up in Google Docs or writing it out. In Science we have been continuing to explore simple machines and we are moving in to constructing Rube Goldberg machines. In French we will continue to look at the vocabulary surrounding "Who Am I?".  Students will be presenting their learning on a cube. In math we have looked at some Splat math and a 3-Act math problem.  We also started a project called "Design a Zoo", which will focus on area and perimeter. Upcoming Events and Reminders: - We will be doing a home reading exchange on Thursday. - We will b...