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 as “I love to swim” or “I love NY pizza”) and if it matches you, you take a step into the circle. It was a way for us to see some of our similarities. During lunch, she was greeted with large smiles by students from the other half group. Then, during recess, there was a great game of Duck, Duck, Goose played by the 4th Grade girls.

In writing, we celebrated the joy of finishing our personal and persuasive writing pieces. Photos from our celebration can be found here! Not only did we get to nosh on some cookies and sparkling cider, but we also wrote really lovely compliments to many of our classmates about their essays. We are now going a little backward in the writing practice, and going back to the basics. We discussed what a sentence is, and the type of words included in a sentence. Students then had to read phrases and identify if they were fragments or complete sentences. Next, we learned what a subject and a predicate are — who/what the sentence is about, and describing what/where/when the subject happened (respectively). We were given a list of fragments and had to convert them into complete sentences. We started working on identifying a mix of fragments and complete sentences and then completing or re-writing the sentences. We also needed to add proper punctuation and capitalization to the newly written sentences. As we start our new writing unit next week, the bar will rise. Teachers across the board will now be expecting students to include capital letters (for the start of sentences and for proper nouns), punctuation, and complete sentences in their writing.

In Social Studies, we ended our conversation about the Revolutionary War by discussing spies, specifically the Culper Spy Ring. This was created by a group of Long Island citizens who reacted to the infiltration of British Soldiers in NYC. It was full of both men and women, but no one knew the real names of the spies — just their pseudonyms and numbers, such as Agent 355. Later in the week, we talked about “What Comes Next,” as sung by King George in the musical Hamilton. This came in the form of the Articles of Confederation, which was approved in 1781 but was discontinued in 1786 for its failure to properly lead the new country in a forward momentum. The Articles of Confederation was a type of democracy that gave more power to the individual states than it did to our country as a whole. In April of 1787, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia and the group of 55 delegates worked together to create a stronger document that would write how our country is led. The main discussion was not about the creation of three branches of government (remember the legislative, executive, and judicial branches?), but about the number of people in congress that would represent each state. The Virginia Plan stated that the number of people in congress is decided by the size of your state’s population. On the other side was the New Jersey Plan, which stated that there would be an equal number of members in congress for each state. The delegation had trouble agreeing to this, so Roger Sherman (of Connecticut) came up with The Great Compromise. <– ask your student not only which plan they preferred and why (New Jersey or Virginia), but also find out what the compromise was! Next week we will talk about the other main discussion: enslavement (or slavery).

MARCH DATES TO BE AWARE OF:

• Tuesday, March 7 –> Purim: COME TO SCHOOL IN COSTUME
• Thursday, March 16 –> NO SCHOOL for Parent-Teacher Conferences
• Thursday, March 23 –> NOON DISMISSAL for Parent-Teacher Conferences
• Thursday, March 30 –> FIELD TRIP to the New York Historical Society and, depending on the weather, Central Park 
  • I’m looking for chaperones, so feel free to email me if you are available to help! We will leave school at 8:45 am and return by (fingers crossed) 1:45 pm

Math with Luis

STEAM with Sammi

The 4th graders got to start learning some 6th-grade math in science this week! We discussed what “average” meant – something that is “normal” and represents a group of numbers. Great examples were brought up by the students such as average height and average basketball scores for a team. We learned that to find this number that represents our data, we need to add up all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers we added together. Since we are working with super weird numbers from data, this is all being done on calculators. This will require repetitive practice across other experiments, but everyone got the hang of it and they were all finding the average dissolving times of the Alka Seltzer independently by the end of class Thursday!