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.