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30 Jan 2023
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January 27, 2023 — Road to Revolution

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 work, information recall, translating, root identification, and pinpointing dialogue. We have come to the part of the story where Ya’akov persuades Esav to sell him his birthright, and the students had many opinions about whether this was a fair exchange. To celebrate all our hard work, we watched the movie “Joseph King of Dreams” which coincides with some recent parashot from the torah, and with the stories that students will study in chumash next year. It was wonderful to see how students connected the events of the parsha that we are learning in chumash in parashat Toldot, with Yitchak and Rivka favoring Esav and Ya’akov respectively, which leads to Ya’akov eventually favoring with his own children. This week we started to delve deeper into the study of Shorashim, the roots of words. Student know that roots usually are made up of three letters and can give us a hint to what a word means. They created flash cards in class to start to memorize the meanings of numerous shorashim, which will help strengthen our text skills.

Music with Heidi

In Music class, Fourth Graders have been presenting songs that they think are powerful – it could be in the meaning of the song’s lyrics, in how the song affected the world or fit into history, and/or how the beat or the melody affect people, or what the song means for them personally, etc. They can perform the song for their class or share a lyric video of a song. Students are also learning how to be an attentive, supportive audience. We all enjoyed Sebastian’s presentation about the Turkish National Anthem, Maxwell’s presentation of a funny song, and Minnie and Shaya’s original song and dance. Fourth Grade students have also been learning the song “American Oxygen.”

STEAM with Sammi

January has been an exciting month for STEAM! We wrapped up our first unit of the year, teamwork skills, and have started our next unit, the Scientific Method. Both of these units stick to the major goal of 4th-grade science: building lifelong skills for the science lab and beyond. 

To finish our teamwork unit, students worked to build spaghetti and marshmallow towers, domino chains with stairs, and aluminum foil boats. Watching the students participate in these challenges filled me with so much joy as I have seen an enormous transformation in their teamwork skills since September. They are spending time planning, listening to each other’s ideas, disagreeing politely, and showing a growth mindset. Of course, we still have arguments here and there because we are only human! Before each challenge, students set intentions for the day. They chose a focus from a list of teamwork skills and reflected on that focus at the end of the challenge. At home, ask your student what aspects of teamwork they feel they have improved on this year and what they think they still need to work on.

For our next unit, the Scientific Method, students are currently making a music video! It has been a few years since I have been able to do this assignment and I’m personally so excited to bring it back. To hear the scientific method song we are working on lookup “Sammi’s Scientific Method Song” on YouTube. As I told the kids- I’m a youtube star! Okay, I’m not really a star, just a teacher using a lot of autotune with a single video. If anyone out there has a recording studio and wants to help me re-record this hit song, let me know! I look forward to sharing our music videos with you when we are done.

Math with Luis

These past two weeks have seen us go even deeper with fractions. By now, 4th graders are experts at converting between improper fractions and mixed numbers, and using that expertise to add and subtract mixed numbers. Most recently, we applied our knowledge to recipes and calculating leftover portions when baking (lots of fractions there!). Next week, we will tackle multiplying fractions and mixed numbers, and begin the chapter review. 

Humanities with Hilary

Dear 4th Grade Families,

In Writing, we are working more thoroughly in personal essay writing. We started the unit by writing about ice cream, and why we like it. Using boxes and bullets (making lists of people, and then for each person a list of qualities about them), we transitioned to writing about people we know or something we strongly believe in. Some students are writing about pets, others about immediate family members, and others are writing about grandparents or cousins. In this writing unit, each paragraph is a reason for why someone should know about the specific person, or why we believe in this cause. We are working on how to stay on topic for each paragraph. For instance, if writing about our brother being good at sports, we don’t want to talk about how he is as a cook or times he takes care of us because that’s not on topic — those are different paragraphs. After writing these simple sentences, we added transition words into each sentence. Some items in our list were:

  • An example …
  • Once,
  • After that,
  • To make matters worse,
  • Last but not least,
  • A second example …
  • Additionally,

This week, we worked on expanding our examples by really painting the picture of what happened. For instance, one student wrote about how slow their old dog is. To paint the picture, they not only added the phrase, “slow as a sloth,” but described the position of the dog’s leash with how far behind them it was compared to other dogs who drag their owners around. Another student expanded their example by describing the process of building a pillow fort with their cousin. Finally, we worked on using prompts to help us write introductory and concluding sentences. 

In reading, we have been working on a few reading comprehension skills. One is writing a [short] summary about what was read that day in our fiction/biography chapter books. We tried to keep it to 1-3 sentences, really picking the most important information. Another skill we worked on is reading a section of a book and drawing/sketching a picture that we envisioned in our minds. Envisioning the story always helps in our comprehension of what is being read! The final skill we worked on over these two weeks was about character traits. As a class, we started by coming up with character traits to describe ourselves. We then came up with a whole list of traits to describe the two main characters in our class read aloud, Tiger Rising, by Kate DiCamillo — Rob and Sistine. This was seen in their homework assignment. Students then worked on finding evidence in the text to prove the character traits, going beyond saying “on page 25.” For instance, students discussed how Rob was chatty because he couldn’t stop talking about the Sistine Chapel and his leg condition in chapter 6. 

For Social Studies, we dove right into the multiple steps leading to the American Revolutionary War, which happened from 1754 until 1775. We discussed how colonists didn’t wake up one day and just decide to rebel — MULTIPLE events happened or laws were enacted that led to this war. This included:

  • The French and Indian War (otherwise known as the 7 Year War)
  • The Proclamation Line of 1763
  • The Sugar Act
  • The Stamp Act
  • Committees of Correspondence
  • Townshend Act
  • Boston Massacre
  • Tea Act/Boston Tea Party
  • Intolerable/Coercive Act (ask about the Quartering Act!)
  • the First Continental Congress
  • The Battles of Lexington and Concord

Students learned the well-known phrase, “No Taxation with Representation,” and the group showed their understanding of what is just and fair. We also made connections with the Civil Rights Movement, and how peaceful protests and boycott tactics were used in both. These 4th Graders have been doing a wonderful job investigating primary and secondary sources. We are always talking about what we see and what it could (and does) mean.

**Book Recommendations from Hilary**

Dear families,

I have seen that many of you are asking about book recommendations for your student. Some parents have mentioned that your children gravitate towards graphic novels, or feel that books have too many words in them, or that the text is too small, or that they’re not into any book around. One of the biggest recommendations I can give is for you to use your local library! The staff there has immense knowledge about books and can give an “if you like _____ then you might like _____” type of recommendation. Having your child walk around a library and have the ownership of picking books they are intrigued by can help keep up their interest in reading. Also, because the city is so large, it is easier to borrow a book here than it would be in a different town/city. 

Another recommendation is to have two types of books around for your student — one that is there in times when they want a relaxing, easy read because they had a long hard day and another one that might be more challenging for days when your child is up for that adventure of a story. Our goal is to get the kids reading and having the stamina to get lost in a story. Using audiobooks — especially for more challenging reads — can help students stay engaged!

HAPPY READING!

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