Reading & Writing
This week, fourth graders dove into the wonderful world of poetry! Students have embarked on analyzing “Heartbeat” by Sharon Creech. This novel composed of free verse poetry, alters according to the subject and mood of characters. This style of writing helps students feel the rhythm of the main character, Annie. Heartbeat also touches on important topics in a young person’s life like identity and connection. Through analyzing this novel’s figurative language, similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, and symbolism, students are able to enrich their own writing. As well as analyzing poetry structure and working on their use of tools like stanzas, rhymes, alliteration, and consonance to strengthen their own written poetry. Our young poets have been working hard on crafting meaningful poetry that uses these key elements to produce their own strong work. Students have focused on dialogue used in poetry and even learned to interpret and act out scenes in readers theater with their book club partners! Students loved getting to hear these poems come to life spoken out loud in front of the class and are beginning to try to include more dialog in their own works. We cannot wait to see what beautiful bodies of work they come up with!
Science
The fourth grade class has kicked off their next science unit, Earth’s Features! This unit is centralized around the conditions and fossils found on our current earth and investigates how fossils tell us about the way the earth changes over time. This week, students have been investigating how fossils might have ended up where they are found, and what the process of fossilization is like. Through researching scientists and their observations of fossils, students have been able to start making connections and inferences about what kinds of fossils have been found, how they were formed, and how they got there.
Math
Students have embarked on their next unit of math skills! Building on the knowledge they have gained over the course of the year, students have started multiplying numbers multiple ways, working towards being able to multiply multi-digit numbers! Fourth grade students have been analyzing shape and numerical patterns, building upon their fast fact multiplication knowledge to help them better solve multiplication problems of large numbers.
Important Dates:
March 15th – Little Big Things Gala at 5:00pm
March 31- April 4 – Spring Break
April 18th-21st – April Break
