Ms. Fraser's 4th Grade: Week in Review

It was a great week in our classroom!

In Reading we finished reading The Secret Soldier: The Story of Deborah Sampson. On Friday the students used character traits to write two paragraphs describing Deborah Sampson. Students had to use evidence from the text to support the character traits they chose to describe Deborah Sampson. The students picked some great character traits, such as bold, adventurous, confident, and hard working. We will continue to use our social studies curriculum to guide what we are reading. Starting next week we will be reading about the Wampanoag.

Samara and Caroline look for words to describe Deborah Sampson

Chris studies his list of character traits

Kaisac and Cole look for words to describe Deborah Sampson

Here's a word that describes her

Jack writes about Deborah Sampson

Mr. Hargraves leads a reading group

We also started learning about verbs this week. The students learned about action verbs, they also learned that there are verbs that do not show action. Students learned about linking verbs. Linking verbs are verbs that do not show action, but link the subject to other information. We will also learn about helping verbs and verb tenses.

We will watched a silly music video about linking verbs on YouTube.

We started my favorite writing unit this week; we started our informational unit of writing. I love this unit because the students get to teach me about all the things they are experts on. This week students picked topics. We have a wide variety of topics. Some of the students' topics include wolves, foxes, basketball, dance, sharks, and German Short-haired Pointers. Students organized the sub-topics they wanted to include in their informational writing by writing their table of contents. Students also learned about three different ways informational writers organize their text. The organizational structures the students learned about so far, include boxes and bullets, pros and cons, and cause and effect. Students will pick the organizational structure that works best for their topic.

Stephanie plans the table of contents for her book

Hunter writes the table of contents for his book on cows

Jack uses an informational book on wolves to help him decide what he will include in his book

Sara tells Ms. Giraidi about her book on gymnastics

Kaisac plans his book on deer

Examples of organizational text structures

Sara tries out different text structures

Caroline tries out boxes and bullets

Model of my table of contents for the gross topic of cockroaches

In math we started module 2. The first section of module 2 is on telling time to the nearest minute and elapsed time. We started the module by plotting different times on a number line. The students thought of the number lines as the clock straightened out and used the number line to show times just as you would on a clock.

Students used the number lines and multiplication (Yes, multiplication! ) to tell time to the nearest minute. To figure out the minute students thought of how many jumps of five they would make plus how many jumps of one they would need. For example 22 minutes would be ( 5 x 4) +2 =22. This may seem confusing to me and you, but it made perfect sense to the students. On Friday students started learning how to use the number line to count forward or backward to determine how much time has past.