Just realized it's been a while since I posted. Before I tell you about what's been happening in Division 4, I just wanted to talk a bit about upcoming report cards, particularly, for the grade 4's.
I think I've talked to most of the grade 4 parents about how your child will be receiving grades for the first time in their academic careers this term. The letter grades that will be provided are NOT interpreted in the same manner that we interpreted A's, B's, C's of even F's in school 10-15+ years ago. Here are the descriptors:
A = Excellent or Outstanding performance (ie. exceptional, above and beyond)
B = Very good performance
C + = Good performance
C = Satisfactory performance
C- = Minimally acceptable performance
Particularly in the first (and 2nd) term, most of what we do is highly scaffolded. This means, that the steps in completing an assignment, are broken down and explained, walked through one at a time. A lot of the work we complete depends on adult support and teacher instruction. Teacher instruction will always be there, however, the expectations for completing work independently will change over time. For example:
In socials, the grade 4's have begun to learn about First Nations groups in Canada. They have been working with an information sheet and a map to correlate where each group has been situated in Canada. I had to provide quite a bit of guidance in terms of how to read the map (boundary lines, review of colour codes and legends, directionality, etc.) and how to extrapolate information from the text in order to find answers.
Summing up, I've told the students that they need to drop the idea that they will be "straight A" students. It's absolutely something they should strive for, however, they also need to be realistic at the same time. Balance is key! I told them that they should definitely aim for the B/C+ range and to remember, that a lot of the grade may stem from adult support.
The 2nd piece to letter grades is that students will be assessed for work habits. This means that they complete their work, come prepared for class, exhibit good effort, work cooperatively, stay on-task, etc. The self-reflecting each week has helped to remind the students of the traits of a good learner (emphasis on learner and not student - I like to remind me that these skills are even relevant to adults and how we are always working to improve on these areas, even me!) Work habits are given either a G for Good, S for Satisfactory or N for Needs improvement.
If you have any questions regarding upcoming reports, please let me know!
In other news:
Math - We've been working on place value and patterning. In place value, the emphasis has been on representing numbers in multiple ways. For some students, we need to take it down a level and solidify their understanding of trading 10 units for 1 ten rod (you could also think of it as trading 10 pennies for 1 dime). For others, they have the understanding that 1- ten rods is the same as 1 hundred flat, but are not quite convinced that 10 hundreds makes 1 thousand or that 10 thousand cubes is 10 thousand (and not 1 million!).
The other day, we also had a conversation about the "=" sign. I asked the students if the statement 2+6=4+4 was true or false? Many of them said it was false. It lead to the discussion of what does equals mean? The majority said that it meant "the answer is coming". I have now temporarily banned the words "equals" and "plus". From now on, equals is "the same as" and plus is "and". I reminded them that most of them learned that plus was "and" when they worked with Mrs. Sproul in Kindegarten .. was happy to get the response "Oh yea!! I remember that!".
Sometimes, we go off on Math tangents. I am constantly amazed at how many connections there are in Math. On Parent Math night, Mrs. Bletcher will be sharing some of the activities we do in Math which will hopefully help you to better understand how one hands-on activity can deepen student understanding in so many strands of Math.
Language Arts - The class has been working hard on developing strategies for Reading Comprehension. Last week, we read the story "Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street". This story was about a girl who was asked to write something in her notebook, but felt that she had nothing to write. She discovers that she can use a variety of strategies to help her generate ideas: stretch the truth, make something up, look around her, etc. I asked the students to make predictions based on the cover and then another prediction after I read the first page. The goal with this is for students to understand that a story's characters, problem and setting is usually introduced early on in the story. Students were also asked to respond to the ending (many had difficulty with this - I got a lot of thin summaries rather than responses) and to identify what the author wanted them to remember about the story. This will be a graphic organizer that we will use a few more times until students start to develop a deeper understanding of it's purpose.
This past week we also started practicing connecting. I sent them with a graphic organizer to the library, however, I think we need a review about connections. For some, they've been connecting for a number of years ago. I would say the majority of the class needs to remember:
1. Connections are not one sided. They cannot only state their part, they need to also talk about what part of the story sparked their memories.
2. What is the purpose of your connection? If you say that the character in the story has blue shoes and you have blue shoes too, how does that help you better understand the story?
I touched on that briefly yesterday when I was reading our read aloud. The book had just described how the mother frog was fussing over her son before his departure - many of the children said that they could identify with this. We talked about the purpose of being able to connect with Gilbert's situation - it helped us understand how he felt without him having to spell it out for us!
Science - The grade 3's have finally finished up their little flap books on each of the planets. They are creating a lap book of different components of the solar system. They look fantastic! It will be exciting when they finally get to share it with you. We will be jumping into constellations and meteors next and that will be pretty much the end of the unit. It looks like we're just in time - our field trip to HR McMillan is coming up soon. (The grade 4's wondered why we weren't going on a field trip about Weather - I made the point that none of them had gone on this field trip before and that not all the field trips would be about one particular grade - there will be future field trips that revolve around the grade 4 curriculum, just not all of them!)
The grade 4's are working on their Weather unit. Some of their assignments:
1. Last week, I assigned a weather book - the need to describe the morning and afternoon weather using words (particularly mentioning whether we have any precipitation or not), take the temperature once and record it on the thermometer (ball park it) and draw a picture of the weather. This should hopefully be finished up in 2 weeks.
2. I've also asked them to complete a thermometer worksheet page - they need to find the temperature of 3 different locations in the world and record it on the thermometer.
3. Get a pop bottle (or water bottle) of decent size and cut the top part off (leave about 3/4 of the bottle). Flip the top part over (make sure you take the cover off first). Tape the edges if you can. Here's a picture:
I asked them to have this ready for next Thursday. We read a page about measuring precipitation and had a really great discussion about the purpose of tracking rainfall. We talked about floods vs. droughts, river levels and what it meant of the wildlife that life in it and how that effects even more animals. Specifically, the idea of salmon in BC and how that caused the fluctuation of the eagle population. (I told them to ask their families to bring them to Boundary Bay if they could - read on the news that there's quite a number of eagles over there right now). If it weren't for reports and this dreary rain, I'd go myself!
Socials - The grade 3's are working on Canada - we finished identifying all capital cities (there will be a quiz on Thursday) and worked on identifying major rivers in Canada.
The grade 4's, as I mentioned earlier, are working on First Nations. They have some homework - complete the page on the different types of tribes in Canada (and the regions they live in) and finish the corresponding map that goes with it. A few of them chose to go to homework club yesterday (and are asking to go again on Monday) to complete it. Please ask them what they decided to do! This is due on Tuesday.
This has been a very wordy post, so I'm going to stop here. Have a lovely weekend!
