Humanities with Hilary

Dear 4th Grade families,

We hope you are having a wonderful time celebrating the Jewish festivities this fall. There’s so much happening with Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot AND Simchat Torah! A reminder that next Thursday night is the Sukkah Sleepover for 4th Grade (a tradition that is returning to us!), and on Friday Morning the students will be leading an activity with you inside the Sukkah at 8:30am (a great time to pick up their sleepover gear 😉)

We had our first official SEL (Social Emotional Learning) class this past Monday. We reviewed what “bullying behavior” can entail, or what it can look like. As well, we talked about the different roles a person can take in situations. Here is what we came up with:

We will continue this conversation, not only discussing how it relates to us in school, but also how it relates to American History and interactions/encounters different type of people had.

In writing (and reading), we are starting to create our (realistic) fiction stories and — let me tell you — many of these kids are very excited to write them out. We have stories about:

• robots taking over the world
• forgetting to lock horse stalls
• a made-up almost 7th wife of Henry VIII
• a snowball fight
• the journey the baby brother takes to come out into the world
• fighting darkness
• Elle Woods getting deferred from Harvard
• and more!

Since they first started brainstorming ideas, we have started to look more deeply at the characters in the story. We have started to think about external and internal character traits, which could also be seen as traits you can physically tell about a person (external) and traits that you would never know just by looking (internal). The class also thought about what their character/characters want, and what is preventing them from accomplishing this desire. We took these t-charts and applied them to our independent reading books. We have also plotted out story arcs, where we think about our beginning/middle/end as well as the problem/solution. As we write this, we go into it knowing that we might not follow it exactly, but it’s a good place to start from.

In Social Studies, we got to adventure around Battery Park and Ellis Island last week! Here are hundreds (not even joking) of photos taken during our trip — enjoy! https://photos.app.goo.gl/RiwcfcLTqKUcUsLe9 . This week, we started discussing European explorers. We talked about why they traveled and were searching for new places or routes (God, glory, gold), and how they got there. We discussed the challenges they faced. As well, we talked about the native nations they interacted with, and how those interactions ended. Today, the class was divided into four groups, and they read about at least one explorer — Robert de la Salle, Juan Ponce de Leon, Hernando de Soto, and Samuel de Champlain. As well, we analyzed art work that presented what these first interactions COULD have looked like. Here are two examples:

Ask your student what they remember about that explorer!

Chag sameach everyone!

Math with Luis

4th grade have been very kind to me this past week! Justin’s last day was Friday, September 30th, making this week my first “real” week. We are just now heading into the last chunk of our first unit on whole number familiarity up to 1,000,000, and getting our hands dirty with everyone’s favorite graphic organizer, the bar model. We’ve (mostly) completed our beginning of the year growth assessments, and have covered comparing and ordering numbers, adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers, and rounding and estimating so far in this unit. We have also established the wonderful tradition of fun Fridays – since this was a short week, I was allowed an exception by the 4th graders today but I will very much continue this great Justin tradition (math games and fun on Fridays – sometimes online!) throughout the rest of the year. Thank you, 4th grade!

STEAM with Sammi

As the kids have been saying- these weeks are bananas with the holidays! Luckily, with STEAM 3 times a week normally, we have still been able to see each other 4 times over the last two weeks.

For science, we started our first unit The Scientific Community. In this unit, we will be working on the very valuable skill of teamwork through a series of challenges.

Questions we will answer across the unit:

• How do we work together as a team?
• How do we speak to members of our team?
• How do we share our ideas while respecting others’ ideas?
• How do we kindly disagree with someone?
• How do we make sure everyone is involved?

The first challenge was to build the tallest tower possible with 15 pipe cleaners. Along the way, while building, students also had to pivot to work with only one hand and then to work without speaking. What felt very easy at first explanation suddenly became very difficult! For homework, students reflected on what problems came up during the challenge, how they solved these challenges / could solve these challenges, what was good about working in a team, and what was challenging about working with a team. These reflections helped as figure out some areas that we want to improve on first! The students’ responses are in the photo album for this week. After reflecting, we tried the challenge again. This time, we spent time planning and agreeing on an idea BEFORE building. This made for a much more successful start!

For technology, we continued some skill assessment work to evaluate what everyone remembers, forgot, and still needs to learn. Feel free to check out the “Chromebook Skills Challenge” on Google Classroom to see what your student knows! Anything they did that is highlighted in orange was something they received teacher help in.

Judaics with Shira

Fourth graders worked on 5 step Teshuvah comics to portray the five steps of making amends and trying to create positive change in our lives. In preparation for Sukkot we have been learning about the concept of Ushpizin, symbolic guests that we can welcome into the sukkah and our lives. Get ready to share in some learning on this topic at the Sukkah parent breakfast event next Friday!

Hebrew with Rimma

4th grade students learn how to retell the story in Hebrew which offers more opportunities to reinforce their vocabulary and grammatical structures, to increase their ability to recall and summarize the story by building framework , characters and events that they can use in their own stories. Enjoy !!

PE with Anne

Fourth graders are playing fun tag games such as “Mirror Tag” and other class favorites such as “Pac-People” to increase their stamina and strength. In addition, Fourth graders are practicing; team-building exercises, underhand throwing, movement patterns designed to improve coordination, and the sport of pickleball.

Music with Heidi

In Music class, our Fourth Graders have been practicing their rhythm stick techniques and reviewing rhythmic notation – 4-beat bars, quarter/eighth/half/whole/dotted notes, quarter/half/whole rests, and repeat signs. They have been creating, reading, saying, clapping, and playing rhythms. Xylophones are coming soon!