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!