Bingo!

On Wednesday January 9th, we had our fourth grade Bingo Reward! Students who had their work completed and their Responsibility Cards with enough credit were invited to Dahlager Theater to play many fun games of Bingo. There were coupons as prizes. Fun!

Realistic Fiction

Our genre study in the fourth unit is Realistic Fiction. Here is an image of the notes we were taking in class.

Summarizing

When we returned to school, we started Unit 4: Summarizing and Fix-Up monitoring strategies in fourth grade reading. We read several articles and practiced our skills.

One article was the Land of Ice and Snow. We use what we learned in the first unit of Main Idea and Details to figure out the big ideas: titles, pictures and captions, repeating words, first and last lines, and we summarize each paragraph into our "big ideas". After reading and rereading, we take our big ideas and use them to craft our summary. Our papers can get messy as we are actively reading and taking notes.

Four Characters

Ms. Leom uses "reciprocal reading" (officially referred to as "reciprocal teaching" strategy) in her classroom to support student reading. She introduces the four skills using characters.

First, we meet Madame Prediction. Before and during reading, we should predict.
I think ... I wonder ...

 We also met Clara Clarifier. As we read, when we come to a word or phrase we don't know, we clarify or use fix-up monitoring to know we need to pause, reread, and attempt to sort out what isn't making success. Clara says, "Reread! Reread! Reread!" She also encourages using context clues, reading ahead, and slowing down.

 Queen of Questions is another character. She has questions before she reads, as she reads, and after she reads. She works well with Madame Prediction and Clara Clarifier to support our comprehension, understanding of the texts we read.

Sunny Summerizer is another character. Before she starts a book or text, she thinks about everything she knows about a topic, summarizing. As she reads, she might stop at a section, a page, a chapter, or after reading to retell the big ideas in the order that they happened.

We talk about the four characters as the four main hats we wear as readers. Our brains are active as we read, constantly switching hats to support our understanding of the texts we read.

Holiday Cheer

From our school family to yours ... we wish you the best in 2019!

Mr. Lundeen, Mrs. Arens, Mr. Lyon, Mr. Greninger, Ms. Leom,  and Ms. Hakes-Anderson
the fourth grade teachers

Rotten Milk

There was only the one year, when teachers returned to school after Winter Break, and the stench of rotten milk was overpowering ... forgotten in a locker over Winter Break ... now we clean our lockers before we head home for the calendar year.

Grinch Emotion

On the last day before Winter Break, as the end of our Grinch week activities, we watched the full-length 2000 version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Ms. Leom stopped the movie and we applied our Olweus learning.

Here is one example, what are some healthier choices when so-filled-with-ugly-GRINCH-level emotion?

Gifts

Mr. Greninger and Ms. Leom both gave gifts to fourth graders before Winter Break.

Mr. Greninger gave coupons for a free homework assignment and initials with a candy cane.

Ms. Leom invited students to pick a new book, a puzzle eraser, a pencil, and a candy cane.

Guest in Music

On December 18th, Dr. Terry Vermillion from St. Cloud State University taught a master percussion class on new hand drums at Milaca Schools. Some fourth grade classes were invited into our own Dahlager Theater to be a part of the learning!!

What do we do?

Ms. Leom continues to work on clearly communicating to students what we are working on in class. Just before break, she started visually spacing out our learning by posting examples of the papers so students can track the learning. We work on each part together in class. Some students need more time. There is work time at the end of class.

Many students like seeing everything we've learned all laid out. It is also fun when you were participating, on track, and you get to skip to step five or six on the list!

Northeast Maps

As we are learning our capitals and states, Ms. Leom has made additional efforts to give students opportunities in class to learn our capitals and states in the Northeast. We practiced with puzzles, we used practice tests, we learned some memory tricks (Montpelier, Vermont - starts and ends with mont), we read about the Northeast, we drew posters ...

Our big test is Friday January 11th!