November 7th

Halloween, wearing pink for women's health and learning from our visiting authors - Grade 3/4 has had a very busy few weeks!

Reading

Students have been working on a character unit. They have increased their understanding of character traits and how we look for evidence from the text to help us understand the character better. We have used an organizer to help us look at the following:

• What the character wants or struggles with?
• What gets in the character's way of getting what they want?
• What are the characters's internal and external traits?
• What is the character's attitude towards themselves and what do others think about the character?
• How does the character change or what do they learn?

These are great questions to use when talking with your child about the book they are reading at home.

Writing

We have been working on creating characters and their traits, planning a story using a story mountain and have started drafting our scenes. There is a lot of planning and skill development needed for this genre. The students are enjoying learning about each other's character, what they are struggling with and how their character will change. These stories are a few weeks away from publication.

But please go to this voicethread link and enjoy the students reading their second narrative. If you want to leave a comment, you need to join voicethread. There is no fee involved and the students would appreciate your feedback.

We also enjoyed working with our visiting authors and learning more about the art of poetry. Here is a snippet of one of our lessons where we had to act out an emotion before we tried to write about it.

Showing Emotions on PhotoPeach
We will be revising our drafts of these emotion poems and sending these along to Sara and Michael using our new gmail account which we have set up for professional purposes. This account will be only used in school and occasionally for homework when assigned.

In math the grade four students are wrapping up their multiplication unit and will be starting division next week.

Science

The class of electricians are  enjoying the challenge of  building series and parallel circuits to turn on lightbulbs and start motors. We are learning about receivers and sources of electricity, insulators and conductors and how to operate a string of lights. Check out these scientists in action.


Electricians at Work on PhotoPeach




I look forward to our upcoming parent conferences and discussing your child's progress in person.

Theresa