Fun in the Fourth Grade

After nearly two months of hard work, last week was a great opportunity to have some fun in the fourth grade.

For the last two weeks our students have been mastering the art of the array. These handy models help students learn the processes behind multi-digit multiplication. If you look carefully at the pic collage above, you will notice the students carefully creating the arrays with our base-ten pieces. This week's focus will be on using sketches of the models to quickly solve two-digit by two-digit algorithms.

In addition to new learning in math, we also completed our second independently written persuasive paper. The students were asked to describe the perfect pet and defend why they thought it was a good choice. We are already seeing huge gains in the writing abilities of our students. It will be fun to share their work at our upcoming conferences.

In Language Arts we have been focused on informational text and learning about climates from around the world. This has tied in nicely to our new ELD unit, which is a series of lessons on the geographical features of Oregon. We will end our studies with a writing piece where students must defend living in either a desert or tropical climate.

And, finally, the fun! On Friday, rather than having a traditional harvest party, our students headed to the computer lab for an afternoon of code.org. This fantastic site is dedicated to helping kids learn the fundamentals of computer coding. While it at first seems like all fun and games, we believe our students will attest to the thinking skills they had to use in order to complete the coding challenges. You could feel the energy in the lab as the kids worked through some pretty tricky puzzles. We want to encourage all our students to visit the code.org website and continue the course two activities.

Friday was wrapped up with one of our favorite art projects. Students used crayon, Sharpie, water colors, and a straw to create the masterpieces shown above. If you are in the building, be sure to take a closer look in the fourth grade hallway.

We were lucky to have two of our moms donate time to come in and cut apples and scoop caramel for our special "harvest" snack. A special thank you from Mrs. Harrington and Ms. Kinsman for not only providing the help in getting the food ready, but also cleaning up the classroom after the art and eating!