Halloween Acrostics

Reviving their knowledge of acrostic poems, students wrote one on the topic of Halloween.  Since we're off for our half term break next week, we've been "Halloweening" it up this week.  It was great to see the students recall the format of this type of poetry (having learned it last year) and being able to adeptly create poems and using vocabulary with ease.  Great job 4th Grade Purple!  Have a great, safe break.

Halloween Acrostics

Happy Halloween

Next week is our half-term break so ISG students and staff celebrated Halloween today.

From the ghost, goblins, witches and more in 4th Grade Purple we'd like to wish you a Happy Halloween!

Mosaic Project

ISG is doing a mosaic project in collaboration with Gasilini.  These two groups will be creating a mosaic mural titled, "Under the Sea".  Each student at ISG will be involved in two parts with this mural: a) creating a sea creature in a team, which the design will be transferred to wood, cut out and the children at Gaslini will cover with mosaic tiles, and b) filling in the mosaic tiled background for the mural.

This is an exciting project and Ms Stacey came to 4th grade purple to get us started on part 1 of it yesterday.

2x2 Digit Multiplication

This week students are learning how to multiply 2x2 digits and 3x2 digits.  It's a tricky process with many steps but we find working together, discussing our steps and learning from each other helps us to better grasp the concept and accurately do the procedure.

Multiplying by 2 digits

Now that we've learned how to multiply 2x1 and 3x1 digits, we are upping our repertoire.  This week we're learning how to multiply 2x2 and 3x2 digits.  Wow!  We are really working our brains and creating some strong neuro pathways by doing our process correctly with an understanding of why we do what we do.

Math Antics has a great video explaining how to do this:

What Am I?

With Halloween just around the corner, students' thoughts have turned to what they will wear and the activities they'll participate in on Thursday.  Today, we decided to share a little about our Halloween costumes.

Using Kidblog, students wrote clues about their Halloween costumes.  This endeavour allowed them to utilize their descriptive writing skills that we've been honing over the last few weeks.

Think you can guess what or who we'll be?  Go ahead.  We dare you ;)  Muah-ha-ha

What Am I?

Multiplication War

Having a good knowledge of our multiplication facts is important for us in 4th grade.  Fact fluency enables us to perform more in depth math calculations while not having to focus heavily on figuring out our multiplication tables since they'll come more easily to us the more we work with them.  One fun way to practice our facts is through card games like multiplication war.

In multiplication war, students flip over two cards and multiply them (the factors) together to get the product.  For our purposes J = 11, Q = 12, K = 0 and A = 1.  It's a lot of fun anticipating the factors and coming up with the correct product to win the cards.  Of course we've had to make a few house rules such as first one to answer cannot answer again in the same round if a mistake is made, thus allowing the other person a chance to find the product.  It's always great fun and amusing to hear products being announced animatedly in the hallway.

Comic Fun

In enhancing our tech knowledge, students are learning how to save information to their own USB.  This is essential for certain tasks that we're undertaking in the classroom, such as publishing written work via MS Word and creating comics via Comic Creator.  Our MACs unfortunately are not connected for us to print directly from, which is fine as we are learning how to save our work in other manners AND we'll have an item with a year's worth of work on it that will provide each of us with a nice portfolio at the end of 4th grade.

Today students learned how to save items created via Comic Creator as PDFs onto their USB.  The best part, we used this activity as a great peer teaching tool.  So after I had taught a couple of students the process, they then turned around and helped one other, who was then responsible for teaching another and so on and so forth until we'd all learned how to save our work today.

How Are You Intelligent?

Our Brainwave unit has led us into the multiple intelligences.  We've learned that there are many different ways we learn, and each of us is more in tune to learning in a specific manner.  Some of our intelligences are number smart, music smart, nature smaart, self smart, etc.  In groups we read an article about some of these intelligences before then taking a survey to see if we can find out how we learn best.  Learning how we learn will help us to study, and incorporate new information into our minds.

Expert Groupings

In IPC we're currently learning about the different learning styles.  For our first task related to this, in their pods students were given one paragraph to read.  They initially had to read their paragraph independently and then discuss what it was about.  Working together, they needed to come up with a one sentence summary about their paragraph.  Finally, their group shared with the rest of the class what their information said.  This was a great way for students to share their knowledge, summarize and practice their group work skills.

Break Apart Multiplication

Our new math unit, Chapter 3, focuses on multiplication and division.  To prepare us for the algorithm we'll be facing shortly (2x1 and 3x1 multiplication), students are learning a strategy to apply to solving these types of equations.

This strategy is called the Break Apart Method of multiplication.  It is where we break a number apart using expanded form, multiply each part individually, then add up the products to find the overall total.  While a little more lengthy than the traditional algorithm, which we'll be facing next, it helps build up an understanding of how the algorithm works.  Understanding the meaning behind what we do is of the utmost importance so students can develop a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts.

Here is a video explaining the method:

IPC Brain Games

In IPC students had chosen an activity and practiced it for a week with a clear purpose.  As we've been talking in our Brainwave unit, when you learn something new you create new neuro pathways in the brain.  We worked on creating one or more of these neuro pathways by learning something new - whether it was a song, poem, activity, instrument, etc.

This week students have been sharing their project, their success, their hurdles and given demonstrations regarding their brain game.  It's been great to see students share their experiences and discuss the results and expanding ideas.

Roll and Go

We are busy reviewing our different concepts from Chapter 2 - Estimation and Number Theory.  Some of the concepts we're working on are front-end estimation, rounding, factoring, finding GCF, multiples and finding LCM.

Today during teacher led pod in math students did an activity called "Roll and Go".  First they rolled two different coloured dice.  Then they made a 2 digit number with the two digits from their dice (ie. if they rolled a 4 and a 5 they could make 45 or 54).  They did this twice to make 2 different two-digit numbers.  Next they found the factors for each and then listed all the common factors.  Finally, they looked at the common factors and noted the GCF (greatest common factor).

Yet another way we can review concepts while having fun, mixing up our methods and using our critical and creative thinking skills.  As well it allowed us to give our metacognition some work as we could evaluate: a) which number created would be easier for us to find factors for, and b) using a t-chart or line to list factors depending on how our mind works.'

Peer Editing

As we work through the writing process, we not only self-edit and revise our work but we incorporate peer editing as well.  Whenever we have a written piece, it's always good to have fresh eyes peruse our work and help us make our writing better.

Yesterday we talked about what good peer editing is.  It is:
*active listening
*providing positive feedback
*working WITH our partner to help improve their writing by giving suggestions and asking "How could we _________________?" (enhance the sentence, increase your word choice, etc).

We also noted that since we're helping each other out, we don't make marks on the other person's paper - they do that themselves.

ELA all the way!

During our ELA pods we do many different activities related to language arts.  These can include activities pertaining to reading, writing, spelling and grammar.  Practicing our skills while getting instruction in small groups is a great way for us to build a strong learning program, meet the needs of each other better, and get smaller teacher-student ratios during instruction.  Also, many of us participate more in smaller groups and our voices are heard better.

Small group instruction with Ms. S

Writing in class journals

Fluency and comprehension practice during read to someone

Changing the World

During one of our language arts pods this morning, students took to kidblog to write about how they would change the world.  Would you like to know what we'd do?  Please read our blogs and check it out. :)

Changing the World

Reward Earned

This week students earned a reward for their behaviour and hard work in class.  Their reward: a free recess moment.  Down to the field we went where students could get their energy out, play a game or two and just have some fun.

Neurons

As we look closely at neurons in our IPC Brainwave unit, we see that a neuron is composed of various parts.  There is the axon, cell body and dendrites.  Today we learned that when one neuron's axon touches another neuron's dendrites a synapses occurs.  To illustrate this further, we acted this process out.  In partners, one student used their arm to represent an axon while their partner used their fingers to represent dendrites.  When the dendrites grasped onto the axon (or in our case when the hands grasped onto the arm) we created a synapses.  It's with hope that this kinaesthetic learning helps aid in the understanding of the process for the students.

AXON

DENDRITES

SYNAPSES!

Finding GCF

We've been working on finding factors in math these days.  Using our knowledge of multiplication facts, finding factors can be quite easy.  A factor is a number that when multiplied with another equal a desired or chosen number.  For examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 ,and 12 are factors of 12 (1x12 = 12, 2x6 = 12, 3x4=12 --> any numbers that when multiplied together equal 12).

Once we found factors, we could start finding GCF or the greatest common factor.  To do this we first find the factors of 2 or more numbers.  Then we compare the factors of each.  The greatest factor that is similar in both numbers is called our GCF.

When doing this today. in partners students had to find the factors for a given number (two numbers were given with some students finding the factors for one and other students the factors of the other).  Then in groups of four we compared our factors (each partnership had a different number to find factors for) and then looked for the GCF.

This was a great way to continue working on finding factors while learning how to find the GCF between two numbers.

(ie. factors for 16 are 1, 2, 8, 16 and factors for 24 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24.  The GCF for 16 and 24 is 8 - the biggest factor or number that multiplies into 16 and 24).