4th Grade Enrichment

This week's guest blogger is Sarah Carlson.  Congrats Sarah!

Hello and thank you for coming. This week in Mrs. Burbridge’s class we discussed a new signpost called

Tough Questions. We also talked about critical thinking sentence starters and why they all had because

in them. We discussed the end of the book as we finished it. At the end of the week we did a worksheet

on one character's best of times and worst of times. This concludes the end of the guest blog post.

I hope you will stay until the big event at the end of the year.

The guest blogger,

Sarah Carlson

4th Grade Enrichment

This week's guest blogger is Taylor Robshaw.  Congrats Taylor!

This week in Mrs. Burbridge’s class we have been discussing higher order thinking. That is when we stretch our brains a little further. Also, if we end up picking this book as our final book, we have been brainstorming our final activity ideas. The other day, we analyzed character quotes and the next day we shared them. We used text evidence and examined character traits during this activity. Next week’s goals are to be finishing our book. That’s all for now.

Sincerely,

Taylor

                                           

                                                              

Reading Tips

Need some tips for increasing reading at home?  Learn about phonics, motivating your child to read, creating a literacy friendly home, and what makes a good classroom from PBS.

4th Grade Enrichment

This week, I'm introducing a guest blogger.  The students submitted summaries of our weekly activities, and will be responsible for updating our progress on my blog.  Our guest blogger this week is Lauren Punke.

This week with Mrs. Burbridge, we have been doing lots of exciting things! We have been making blueberry festival brochures with text evidence. We also talked about how some picture books can be harder than chapter books. Another thing we did was we did quick writes using text evidence to build writing endurance.

Sincerely,
                                                            
Lauren

Hello Literacy!

Over the Columbus Day weekend, Mrs. VanOosten and I had the opportunity to attend the Hello Literacy conference in the St. Louis area.  We left with so many fresh and easy to implement ideas, and can't wait to bring them back to share with our coworkers.  We are also going to push for a renewed commitment to guided reading and writing workshops to help improve our students' literacy skills.  We were both thankful that we work for a district that provides us with professional development opportunities, and values the training of teachers for the benefit of students!

Skip Counting Songs

Our 3rd grade classes are just starting to practice skip counting in preparation to learn multiplication.  This is a much more effective strategy than rote memorization of facts.  If you can't remember 8x7, you need some kind of strategy to solve it.  Skip counting also ties in with the Touch Math strategies that I use with my math groups.  Visit this website to find some fun skip counting songs:  Skip Counting Songs

4th Grade Enrichment

Last week we continued with our novel, A Handful of Stars.  We practiced using visualization strategies while drawing the mason bee houses that Salma and Lily create in the book.  Students had to draw the 2 different bee houses, then use text evidence to explain their drawings.  We also learned a new signpost, Again and Again.  We learned that when the author repeats a phrase, situation, or object over and over again, we need to stop and think.  In this case, we would ask ourselves why the author is repeating it, and how is it important to the story?  This gives the reader a clue about the theme or conflict, or can foreshadow future events in the story.