The Pumpkin Patch

This idea came from a colleague last year who did a "Secret Santa" activity with her students each year. I adapted it and started doing it every month to encourage positive behaviors. We love it! At the end of every month, my students receive a special mission. They are given the name of one student to watch and observe all week. This is a top-secret assignment. No one knows who is watching them! The goal is to spot that person doing one or two kind, friendly, generous, respectful, responsible things during the week. Then, at the end of the week, each student decorates a pumpkin, turkey, snowflake, heart, clover, rainbow, etc. (depending on the month) for their top-secret person. On the back, they write about the great things they saw that person doing. Then Miss Barber collects them and posts them on the board. At the end of the day, each student receives the item with their name on it and gets to read about the positive things they were spotted doing that week. It's such a fun surprise!

On the last day, we all are dying in suspense because we see our name on the board but we still don't know who was spying on us all week! Even Miss Barber participates in the fun and watches a students all week (and has a student watching her all week). Many of the students keep their pumpkins in their pencil boxes as reminders of the ways that other students appreciate them and their good behavior. What an encouragement!

Field Day!

It's that time again - time for one of Miss Barber's favorite days of the year - 

FIELD DAY! 

Our class had an awesome time this year. We even won 2nd place in the 4th grade Tug-of-War competition! Check out some our pictures below. Thank you to all the parents who came out to help!

Red Ribbon Week

This week, our school participated in Red Ribbon Week, a national anti-drug week that takes place in schools across America. Each class designed a persuasive poster about being drug-free. Here's our poster and some of our smiling faces posing with it in the cafeteria! Each handprint represents one student and the reasons they commit to be drug free. 

Awesome Animal Adaptations!

This week, Mr. Barber visited our classroom to teach us about animal adaptations. He showed us some incredible stuff like huge elk antlers, bear and javelina skulls, pheasant feathers, an Arizona black tail rattlesnake skin, and a badger fur. He taught us about how different animals adapt to their environment in different ways. Right now we're writing informational books and reports about animals and their adaptations so we had a lot of background knowledge to connect our new learning to. Thanks for visiting us, Mr. Barber! If you want to learn more about animal adaptations through a fun game, click here!

We're also reading a new book titled Where the Red Fern Grows - one of Miss Barber's favorite books! Mr. Barber showed us how Billy sets traps for raccoons in the river bottoms with one of his own steel hunting traps.  Then we set it off on Miss Barber's wooden pointer! Ouch!

And finally, this week was Family Night at Peter Piper Pizza. Here's a picture of Miss Grace and I making pizzas for the Mensendick families! We had a blast!

A. Caught a Fly!

We know that this has nothing to do with what we're learning about in class (unless you count the fact that we just learned about invertebrates and how the fly's eyes are a special type of adaptation that helps it stay alive). But today, in the middle of class, A. caught a fly with his BARE HANDS! We thought it was dead, but it was just stunned and it actually woke up and tried to fly away while A. was still holding it! We had a pretty exciting morning!

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Reading Informational Text

Miss Barber loves reading expository/informational text! 

In fourth grade we really focus on reading to learn. One great way to learn new information is by reading newspapers, articles, textbooks, websites, and books. This week, we have been learning about the ways authors help us as we try to understand what we're reading. Authors give us organizational features and graphic features that help us make sense of the text. So we practiced reading those features first, before we even looked at the rest of the text. And we were amazed by how much we could already figure out! After making connections between the graphic and organizational features, we made predictions and asked questions. Then we finally started reading the actual text. We made connections as we read and then used those connections to help us confirm our predictions and answer our questions. Our texts may look messy but that's just a small representation of all the learning going on in our brains!

Welcome Back!

Miss Barber's class is in full swing after a wonderful summer vacation! Look for some summer pictures coming soon!

I wanted to share two awesome things that we've been working on already in fourth grade! First is our mission statement and social contract. These two documents were student created and they direct everything we do in our classroom. I'm so proud of their wonderful ideas!

Secondly, we've been studying plant structures and pollination. One of my brilliant students - "L" - created this pollination diagram with our blocks during free choice time today! Notice the bee at the bottom flower. The bee then leaves with pollen (green triangle) on it's back and visits another flower. Then the pollen creates a seed which is released from the flower and becomes a new plant! So amazing! Great job, L! :)

End of the Year Video 2012

We Will Rock the AIMS!

It's that time again - time to show the world what we know and rock the AIMS test! Here are some inspirational videos we're watching every morning to get ourselves pumped up and ready to go!

Never Give Up - Lopez Lomong

No Excuses

I Can Do This

Make It Count

Electromagnets: Exploring the Connection Between Electricity and Magnetism

Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Using this discovery, he invented the electromagnet which uses an electric current to create a magnetic field. Using our materials from SRP, we made electromagnets today and conducted an inquiry experiment in which we answered the question "How can we make an electromagnet stronger?" We learned that an electromagnet with no power source doesn't work. Also, an electromagnet with 50 coils of wire is stronger than an electromagnet with only 30 coils of wire.



One group's electromagnet

The electromagnet at work!



8th Grade Holocaust Museum

Our class recently finished reading Number the Stars. Now we are reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes in order to compare and contrast Annemarie Johansen's WWII experience with Sadako Sasaki's post-WWII experience. Coincidentally, the 8th graders in Ms. Clark's class just finished studying the Holocaust and created a Holocaust Museum for our school to tour. We visited the museum and got to ask the 8th grade tour guides lots of questions about the Holocaust. At the end of the tour, we all filled out a reflection where we wrote a wish for the world or a reflection about what the Holocaust can teach us today. Thanks for bringing our learning to life, Ms. Clark's Class!

Talking to a 8th Grade Tour Guide 

Reflections

Seeing the Lightbulbs Turn On!

Thanks to a wonderful professional development provided by SRP, Miss Barber's class received some amazing materials to help us investigate electricity! We learned that the flow of electrons is called an electric current and that's the type of electricity that batteries produce. To demonstrate, we set up a battery on the floor with tape. Then the students stood on the wires in pairs of protons and electrons (+ and - stress balls) with a group of protons on the + side of the battery and a group of electrons on the - side of the battery. Finally we modeled the flow of electrons and showed how a battery "goes dead."

The next day, we created simple circuits, series circuits, and parallel circuits in groups. Thanks for helping us experience electricity, SRP!

Which circuit is a parallel circuit? Which is a series circuit?

Donors Choose!

This week we received a big box from Donor's Choose - an awesome website that allows donors all over the world to donate to classroom projects. This was Miss Barber's third fully funded project and we received a class set of the 4th and 5th grade leveled texts that are recommended by the CORE Standards which we will be implementing next year. These books are wonderful!! And now we will be able to use them in class every day! Here are some pictures of the big reveal!