Tuesday, March 31, 2015

What Happened to March?

Alas, March almost got by me without a single post to Mrs. Sullivan's Scoop!  Since the saying is "Better late than never" I thought I would share a few photos of happenings in our classroom before the calendar turns to April tomorrow.

Science



In the beginning of this month we were working to wrap up our study of electrical energy.  Students completed an engineering design challenge in which they needed to apply their knowledge of closed circuits, schematic diagrams, conductors and the engineering design process in order to design an alarm system that alerted them, via light and sound, if the water in their model trough was low.  


Literacy

We ended this month by bidding farewell to one of our classmates who moved out of state, but not before we had our first ever Book Lunch Bunch.  All students who read our picture book of the month were invited to attend.  We had a great showing!  We shared lunch together in the classroom, discussed the book The Sweetest Fig by Chris Van Allsburg, and shared a special dessert too!  Students seemed to enjoy our book discussion, and later during literacy many dove right into reading our picture book of the month for April, Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg.  Shhhh....don't tell the students that my ploy to get them reading more picture books seems to be working, it'll be our little secret.  



Chris Van Allsburg is one of my favorite picture book authors.  His stories provide many opportunities for students to make inferences.  See if your child can explain to you what an inference is.  We define it as an educated guess which combines what the text says with our own thinking in order to understand what is not explicitly stated in the reading. This is a higher level reading skill that we are trying to develop in all of our fourth grade readers.