The Cooper School Daily

Honey Tasting!

4th_gradeBee Study

As we continue our bee study, we are learning more and more about how honeybees affect our lives and the world around us. This week, students looked into how products made from bees directly affect our economy. To launch this investigation, your researchers studied the ingredient labels of several food and cosmetic items. We found that items such as candles, lotion, lip balm, cereal, snacks, dipping sauces, and drinks contain honey, beeswax, or even royal jelly!

On Thursday, students participated in a honey tasting. Six different types of honey were tasted and then described by the students. Flavor, texture, color, and consistency were examined for each type of honey. Students then had to guess which type of honey they were tasting based on the characteristics found. Several had unique flavors and textures. Ask your child which honey was their favorite!

honey_tastingWriting

Fourth Grade shifted from writing fiction to writing essays this week during Writing Workshop. This style of writing is very different from that of narrative, so we spent the week focusing on outlining our thoughts before writing. Students learned how to develop a thesis and create bullet points for supporting evidence.

Math

This week, your mathematicians used hands-on learning to review data landmarks! Data landmarks are places in a set of data that can help you interpret the meaning more easily. Landmarks include the maximum, minimum, range, median, mode, and mean. Our focus was on the more complicated process of finding the mean. 4th graders used base-ten blocks to build a graph based off of a data set. Then they put all the blocks from the graph together and distributed them evenly among the categories. This allowed them to physically see the process of calculated the mean!