Day 9: What’s happening?
September 14, 2016 | Posted in: Class Updates
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It feels as if we’ve been in school for many weeks! The students are doing a great job learning the routines of our class, and this has allowed us to move into our curriculum with efficiency and enthusiasm! Our first focus in reading has been discussing many of the strategies that successful readers use. We’ve discussed how readers choose books for themselves, why some readers abandon books, and how to use our class library. This afternoon, we’re going to again team up with Ms. Kelleher, our library-media specialist, to learn about how to choose a “Just Right” book for ourselves. This will be helpful as we find students’ independent reading levels in the coming weeks. Yesterday, we learned about how to “buzz”, that is, how to have a group conversation about a single topic. You might be surprised to hear that we’re focusing on something so fundamental, but we’ve found in fourth grade that dedicating time NOW to discussing the basic ideas of taking turns, making eye contact, etc. allows student discourse down the road to be significantly more productive and engaging.
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In math, we’ve been working on place value! Our first few lessons introduced place value concepts and built upon the students’ prior skills. Today, we worked on rounding numbers; a concept that we’ll spread out over a few days. Estimation can be a challenging skill for students, so I teach them the roller coaster strategy. (See picture.) This method lets students break up the rounding process into five steps, and by adding a visual piece, it makes it less overwhelming for many learners. Feel free to show this image to your fourth grader to help them with their homework. Tomorrow, we’ll translate this strategy to a more traditional process in which they round numbers without the elaborate visual process. We’ll return to the roller coaster method when we work on rounding to different places, such as taking a number like 8,372 and rounding to the nearest thousand (8,000) or nearest hundred (8,400) or nearest ten (8,370). I don’t expect mastery on day one, and I admire the hard work students are showing!
We’ve started our Targeted Instruction rotations! As I explained at curriculum night, TI will allow us to meet each student’s individual needs by breaking up classes. For example, during the TI block one week, I might focus on rounding numbers, Mrs. Castle might focus on descriptive writing, and Miss Lacasse might focus on map skills. Rather than whole classes traveling together, we’ll each send our students to the teacher who is offering the activity that best fits student needs. We’re excited to have many different teachers collaborating with us, so stay tuned! This week, students ARE rotating among each teacher as whole classes in order to establish routines. Next week, we’re going to start to shuffle students.
Questions? Send me an email! Have a great day!
