Another Solid Week

Greetings,
First of all, I want to let you know that I enjoyed meeting with you all on Tuesday evening. I felt like I sped through a lot of it, so please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions you might have. It has been a busy week and the kids have had a lot of fun today with getting a casual day AND getting to vote for Orange and Black captains for the first time. Here are some more highlights from the week:

MATH
We have spent the last week working on place value. This has included focusing on using different ways to write numbers (expanded form, standard form, word form), identifying places, identifying values, comparing numbers, and ordering numbers. The students really seemed to enjoy the place value game they played using dry erase boards, dry erase markers, and nine-sided dice. I really feel that this did a wonderful job reinforcing the skills we have been focusing on.

SCIENCE
We began our prep work for our terrarium and aquarium projects. The kids did an excellent job marking and cutting their bottles. We will start working on building our terrariums next week. We also finished up our paper airplane experiments. Ms. Earhart's students did their experiments in the gym and my homeroom did it in Frist Hall. I loved walking around and hearing all of the great "science speak" coming from the kids. I am eager to design another inquiry project that we can do later in the quarter.

Thanks again for all that you do and have a wonderful weekend.

Welcome to 4th Grade!

Greetings,
Well, it has been a week filled with new and exciting challenges for both your children and myself. I am quite thrilled to be teaching 4th grade and I appreciate the students' hard work this week. This blog is intended to give everyone who views it a taste of 4th grade Math and Science. I won't be updating each day, but will add posts on a weekly basis. Check out what has been going on this week:

Math
I think I threw the kids for a loop on the first day with our discussion of the binary (or base 2) number system. My intention wasn't to confuse, but just to make them think about numbers in a different way. We also started our work with "big numbers". A goal for 4th grade is to master place values up to trillion. I used a fantastic website (see the links section of the blog) to help the students visualize such big numbers. We will continue to work with large numbers next week by starting to order and compare these numbers. The students have also enjoyed the Math Races we do each day at the beginning of class. I will be curious to see which side, boys or girls, has been victorious the most times at the end of the year.

Science
I couldn't be happier with the things we have accomplished in Science this week. One of the goals we have for the kids this year is to gain a better understanding of the scientific process. From observing to questioning to hypothesizing to experimenting, we want the students to really grasp these steps and take ownership of their design. In order to move towards that goal, we have been working on paper airplanes this week. Tuesday, the students spent part of the class exploring paper airplanes by using different weights, materials, throwing styles, etc. From this exploration bloomed many wonderful questions like: "Which type of paper would work better?" or "Does how hard you throw it make a difference?" or even "Does weight affect how far the plane goes?". The next step was to determine which questions were testable. After that we discussed how to isolate variables by keeping everything else the same or constant. Today, the students worked in their lab groups to fill out the materials and procedure part of their lab reports. I am looking forward to next week when the students actually test their hypotheses by doing their experiments.

Thank you again for all you do and I look forward to seeing all of you on Tuesday night at 7:00 for Parent Night. Have a great weekend!