Helping Those in Need during the Holiday Season

 Harvest Hope Food Drive

With the holiday season quickly approaching, what a great time to display the LIFESKILL of Caring!  The second grade is collecting canned goods for the Harvest Hope Food Bank.  If your family is able, please send in a few to assist with such a worthy cause.  Your family can decide if you’d like your donated canned good to go toward the Clemson or Carolina side…. 

Meteorologists in Training...

We may just have the next local meteorologist in our class...  

During our Weather unit, we kept track of the weather with various weather tools.  We worked with an anemometer, rain gauge, thermometer, and wind vane to help us predict the weather.  Below you will find a few pictures of our class using the tools to determine the wind speed, wind direction, the amount of precipitation, and the temperature.  

What's Going On?!?

   In reading, we are near the end of a novel that our entire class has been thoroughly enjoying, Night of the Twisters, by Ivy Ruckman.  This book went along with out Weather unit of study and is about the experience twelve year old Dan Hatch and his family has when a series of tornadoes hit his hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska.  In addition to going with our science unit, reading this novel also provided us with the opportunity to apply many of the strategies that we've learned that good readers use.  We will wrap up with this great piece of literature on next Monday.  

   In Writer's Workshop, the students are working with a partner or within a small group to create a Severe Weather Public Service Announcement or a Weather Forecast.  They had the chance to choose between the two and we will start to record them tomorrow.  I hope to either post the final products to this blog or e-mail them out.  

   In math, we are finishing up with unit 4, Decimals and Their Uses.  Students will take the unit test on Thursday.  Our mathematicians did a wonderful job with this unit. The concepts presented in this unit were brand new and everyone worked hard and has become proficient with the basics of decimals.  We will continue to revisit these skills throughout the year and they will expand upon them in fifth grade.  Our next unit will be Big Numbers, Estimation, & Computation; we will be revisiting multiplication and addition (with large numbers) during this unit.  

   We have wrapped up with our Weather unit, but are still putting the finishing touches on our PSAs or Forecast.  We also started with our study of life in Colonial America in Social Studies.  At this point, we've only discussed the countries that started settlements in the New World and their motivations for doing so.  We will go on to learn about the first permanent English settlement, the 13 Colonies, everyday life in the colonies, the economy activities in the colonies, and their government.  Next Tuesday, our students will get a chance to experience a bit of colonial life with our Colonial Day Celebration.  Each fourth grade teacher will lead a different colonial activity and each class will have an chance to rotate to each classroom to better understand life in Colonial America.  
   

My Absence...

Hello all!

  I'm sure you have noticed my absence from our class blog.  I've been experiencing technical issues that have not allowed be to update.  The issue is currently being addressed, so I should be able to post and update the blog again, hopefully, next week.