Fourth Grade Blog

NOTE FOR MAY: Dear Families, Please make sure that your students are practicing every night for this performance. There are songs both in Hebrew AND in English. We want to make sure that the songs are memorized. As well, each student has a line that they are saying to introduce the songs. The English songs can be found on Hilary’s google classroom page. Thank you! Rimma, Heidi, and Hilary Math with Luis In math, we wrapped up unit conversions last week with a short quiz, and then began a mixed review of 3rd grade shape skills and vocabulary, such as... Read More

STEAM with Sammi Working through all the steps of the scientific method in depth is a long and hard process! The fourth graders are still at work on the paper towel experiment and they will be wrapping up their lab reports next week. Over the last two weeks, we focused on writing procedures and on analyzing our data. To find out about our lessons on writing procedures, ask your student to tell you how to draw a snowman! We had a lot of fun poking holes into people’s writing as we found ways to be precise with our words. When... Read More

Humanities with Hilary Dear 4th Grade Families, We have been having a blast at school these past few weeks. Buddy time. Purim. Field Trips. Social Studies lessons. What’s not to love? In reading, we have focused on non-fiction reading. One aspect has been how to read non-fiction books in general. Then we had lessons on “What do I do if I don’t understand the vocabulary?” or “How do I figure out what a complex text is talking about?” We worked on how to organize non-fiction writing and decided if it is a problem/solution text, a compare-contrast text, a cause &... Read More

Humanities with Hilary Dear 4th Grade Families, It’s hard to believe that it is already March — this winter has just flown by! This week, not only did we get new lunch spots and learn who would be in our new half groups, but a new student also joined our community! We welcomed Adele to our class on Thursday. Sammi and I led the class in some name games, reminiscent of games you play at camp, where you do a movement to go with your name. We also played the “Me Too” game, where a person makes a statement (such... Read More

Judaics with Shira Fourth graders have been doing deep text study, moving on in the Toldot story. We started a new perek (chapter) where Yitzchak is now old, and preparing to give the birthright to Esav. The work we did studying for our shorashim challenge really paid off in comprehending this new text as students identified 15 different roots in the verses that we learned. Once we could understand the Hebrew text, it was time to go deeper and ask great questions. As the Torah’s descriptions can be relatively sparse, it does not often tell us what a character is... Read More

At the bottom of this week’s blog, you will find a list of book recommendations and how to find book lists. Please read this section to support your child in their book search!  Judaics with Shira Fourth Graders finished a significant unit in Chumash class, having studied 4 different chunks of torah text. We concluded the unit with an independent assessment and a celebration! For our open book, independent assessment, students were challenged to flip through the learned text to demonstrate numerous skills such as identifying characters, thinking about why certain characters are not present, identifying verbs and explaining their... Read More

Humanities with Hilary Dear 4th Grade Families, Thank you to those who attended today’s MLK Tekes! Over the past month, this group has worked so hard at breaking down Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s words (from his “I Have a Dream” speech given on August 28, 1963’s March for Jobs and Freedoms), gaining an understanding of why Dr. King said what he did. That power can be seen in this class’ choreographed excerpt of the speech, which can be found in our Google Photo Album for the week.  Over the past few weeks, 4th Grade has not only dissected Dr.... Read More

Humanities with Hilary Dear 4th Grade Families, It was so wonderful seeing you, last week, for our Publishing Party! The work they showcased was spectacular, and each student really is the expert of their colony. Here is a photo album of 4th Graders throughout the process of our project! The day after, we went on a walking tour around the Financial District, exploring Lower Manhattan history to see where colonists were and their experiences. During this tour, we studied maps, took on the perspective of different occupations (in relation to economics and how artisans/merchants/military/enslaved people/etc would feel about raised taxes), and... Read More

Math with Luis Fourth graders have been hard at work multiplying and dividing recently! Before thanksgiving, we had some fun writing, sharing, and solving our own word problems involving multiplication and division. We also had some fun thanksgiving-themed multiplication and division to really practice knowing when to divide and when to multiply. This week, we tackled factors, multiples, and prime & composite numbers, and had some very close Jeopardy games to wrap up the week.  Humanities with Hilary 4th Graders have been working SO HARD on their Publishing Party projects [IN PERSON on Wednesday, December 14 at 9am]. They are each... Read More

Humanities with Hilary Dear 4th Grade Families, Thank you so much for coming out to conferences these past two Thursdays. It was so wonderful to get to meet some of you (or re-connect with you), and to sit and talk about your fabulous fourth grader! We are finally at the end of our [realistic] fiction writing unit. Let me tell you we have some very imaginative writers in this grade. Stories about migrating ants, body switching, clones, snowball fights, dog adoption, and more! We can’t wait for you to be able to read them during the Publishing Party on Wednesday, Dec... Read More