- Step Up Day tomorrow Wednesday, May 9. Please make sure your child is at school promptly by 8:30 a.m. This is an opportunity for all the fifth graders to come together in the Wildcat Creek classroom with sixth grade teachers Norman Johnson & Marcella Anwandter and spend the morning as middle schoolers, as well as for fourth graders to be the mentors to the third graders visiting for the morning. They will spend the entire morning, then back to their normal classrooms for recess and lunch at 11:45 a.m. Please let us know if you have any questions.
- Spring Performance: Wednesday, May 23rd at 6:30pm in the Depot, the Strawberry class will perform our version of By the Great Horn Spoon. Rehearsal will be 3:30-6:30pm that day.
Fourth grade math homework, due Thursday
Purple group:
Finish the JUMP Geometry packet (if you did not finish it in class)
Standardized Test Practice (skip problems you've seen before)
Blue Group: No homework.
What if? foundation visit
Today Margaret Trost from the What If? foundation came to visit our class to tell us about the work her organization is doing in Haiti, and how funds the class raises with the Walkathon will help the children there. Our students brainstormed lots of ideas for small, light, fun, and useful things that they can send with her to the kids in Haiti, like small bouncy balls, pens & pencils, hair clips, hot wheel cars, and tiny toys and action figures (but without guns). You can learn more about the organization at their web site: www.whatiffoundation.org.
ERB preparations: Today was our final in a series of preparation lessons for taking the ERB tests next week. The students worked on the constructed response section of the exam that requires written responses and showing your work. It is not multiple choice. We discussed strategies for the reading section, such as, read the question before reading the story so you know what to look for as you read. In the math section we discussed how important showing your work is since the test is scored based on effort and showing your thinking, and is not just about correct answers.
Fourth grade math
Purple group: After sharing the multiple choice homework, we explored more concepts in geometry today. First we talked about slides (translations), flips (reflections), and turns (rotations). Students learned how to describe these on coordinate grids. Our other focus was volume, in particular, volume of rectangular prisms. By looking at connecting cube constructions, students derived a formula for the volume of a rectangular prism: length x width x height. No 4th grade math tomorrow due to Step Up Day.
Blue Group: Today we worked with area in geometry to discover the relationship between length & width compared to base & height. The students were already familiar with the formula for finding the area of a rectangle, length x width = area. Our work today led us to uncover that base x height can be used to find the area of a parallelogram that is not a rectangle. Students cut parallelograms in half and reassembled them as rectangles to prove this formula works for finding the area.
No homework tonight.
