The Journey continues.....

Fourth-graders are deeply immersed in the exciting novel, The Journey to the River Sea, written by Eva Ibbotson.  This adventure story is set in the Amazon Basin of Brazil and is filled with interesting characters and multiple plotlines.  As students explore this habitat, they will also investigate similar settings and themes.  Some of the selections available for independent reading include texts set in South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, or in Central America.  Girls can also examine the way that the theme of the journey or respect for the environment connects with class work and discussion.  Please ask your daughters to share some of her insights with you about any of these works.  We encourage students to keep reading over this Thanksgiving break.

In a few weeks, you will be able to see either a short movie or e-book created with iPads in class by fourth-graders.  Be prepared to set sail on the Amazon and view the diversity of plant and animal life found there. 

Math: Loooong Division

Right now in math we are working on long division.  A student today proclaimed, "Long division is fun!  It can get frustrating sometimes, but mostly it is fun!"  So true.  We are working with single digit divisors and multi-digit dividends.  For now, we are using remainders but in the near future, the girls will be annexing zeroes and finding quotients with decimals!

Math: Multiplication

For the past week, we have been multiplying up a storm!  We've tackled multi-digit problems and just yesterday, we started working with decimal numbers as well.  The girls have loved learning the lattice method of multiplication in addition to the traditional partial product algorithm.

                                            There's more than one way to solve a problem!

Some of the girls even accepted my challenge to try a 10 by 10 lattice problem multiplying 1,234,567,890 * 5,936,108,247.  Now that's a big multiplication problem!!

 

French: Est-ce que tu joues au foot?

As we have recently been learning about sports and how to ask questions, what better way to put our French to use than to survey our classmates about their activities? Each girl asked one of the four questions below to her classmates (if you need a translation, I'm sure your daughter would be glad to help!):

• Est-ce que tu joues au foot?
• Est-ce que tu joues au tennis?
• Est-ce que tu joues au hockey?
• Est-ce que tu joues aux boules?

The girls recorded the number of oui's and non's they received and then shared their results with the group. We combined their data to create a class graph. Curious about the results? Tennis was the most popular sport and hockey was the least popular. Only speaking French, the girls were able to learn new things about their peers as well as the class as a whole.

Art: Observational Drawing with Gourds

The studio markers are a big hit in fourth grade! The girls can achieve a range of colors and value to show pattern and form.  They used their skill to draw a still-life of two gourds. 

Halloween in Fourth Grade

Our Halloween celebration was great fun. Thank you to Yelena Milman, Michelle Trousdale, and Denyce Graves-Montgomery for providing delicious snacks and a creative craft.