Current Electricity

Last week students were given a copper wire, battery, light bulb, and some duck tape and were told to make the light bulb light up. After several tries and frustrations, students finally persevered through and all had a light bulb came on, in more than one way. Afterwards we discussed what a complete circuit needs and how the electricity moves throughout the circuit. Finally, we explored a phet simulation at  http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/circuit-construction-kit-dc. 

Here are some student understandings so far in our study:

Zachary Pham
Sophia Roberts
Kettric Hill

Need Help with Fractions?

The past few weeks we have been working with fractions ( and will continue to!) The students truly are doing a phenomenal job at understanding the concepts of fractions. In math, we are always coming up with conjectures about what we are doing and trying to prove those conjectures to be always true, thus making generalizations. This past week I created a Padlet for students to share their conjectures/generalizations of fractions. You can access the padlet at this web address:

http://padlet.com/jones_k/y1f0es8ntgaj

Having trouble with math homework?
Check back at our padlet to help remember some things we have talked about!
Watch videos at Khan Academy or LearnZillion.com

Reading Responses via Thinglink

This week we learned how to use a new app called Thinglink. It allows you to upload a picture and attach little links to websites, text, or other pictures. We used the app to take place of our reading responses. In a reading response, students are asked to write a letter to me including lots of information about what they are reading. Some things I like them to include is the genre of the book, point of view, author, information about characters, a summary, their opinion of the book, and any thinking they had while reading. Click the following links to see some of our reading responses!

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592059656155693058

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592059439251456002

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592052431043428354

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592059702980902912

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592437681925914624

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592437392279863297

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592059460948590594

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592057195152015362

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592054301656875008

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/592052861093806081

Feel free to ask any of the students questions about their books in comments below!

Thanks for reading!

Mrs. Jones

Division- area models and partial quotients

Lately in math we have been working on division. We have learned that in a division problem we know the total in the problem, but what we don't know is either the number of groups or the number in each group. By figuring out each of these pieces of information we can really make sense of the math and understand why we are dividing. Because of this it is essential to label our problems.

We learned how to use our knowledge of multiples of 10 to perform the algorithms of  partial quotients and area model to represent are division problems. Here are some public records created in class. 

Friday was a big day for our fourth graders! It started out with the Native American Museum that we have been working on most if the year. All the students did an awesome job with their projects!! Then  we had our character awards and several of our students won awards for showing respect, responsibility, and perseverance. To end the day our RBES chorus had a debut performance at the RBHS football game. Such a fun day!

Questioning

In reading this week our strategy is asking questions while we read. Questioning is a critical comprehension strategy that helps readers construct meaning when reading informational text. Questions can be asked before, during, or after reading. We have learned so far how to ask green questions- questions that can be answered directly in the text. They are RIGHT THERE! Read our comments below to see what green questions we are asking while reading!

We learned that energy is never created or destroyed- it come from the sun and keeps changing forms! We created rooms and labeled the energy we found in the rooms. Here is some of our fantastic work: