Mrs. Sathyaraj's Trendsetters: September 2017

Coming Up:

Sept. 29	- Walk for Fun - be ready for outside walking and running
Oct. 6	- Homecoming
Oct. 13	- PGD day, No School
Oct. 18	- Field Trip to Oxbow Park
Oct 19	- Field Trip to Bonneville Dam
Nov. 2 & 3	- LS Conferences

Team Building Day:

On Monday, the fourth graders braved the rain and headed out into the woods to try some team challenges. They surprised themselves with the courage, determination, and team spirit they displayed. Back in the classroom the children discussed and wrote about how the experiences on the challenge course might inform our work as 4th graders, learning to work and play together. We reflected on how the experiences helped us practice dealing with frustration, encouraging each other through difficult times, feeling safe enough to take risks and enjoying a collective sense of accomplishment. See some pictures from the day here.

Author Visit:

On Tuesday, September 19th, Kathryn Otoshi visited OES to talk about her books: Zero, One, Two and Beautiful Hands. She shared some of her own life experiences that gave her inspiration for her stories. Ask your child about her visit and the intention behind our beautiful OES spirit bird.

Curriculum

Social Studies:

Launching Watershed Study
This week we dipped our toes into our yearlong theme of water studies. This began with a walk through our own OES campus to uncover the path of rainwater as it travels to Fanno Creek and beyond. We traced the conveyances of water from the Middle School building, past the Lower School, and into the storm drains. Many students wondered out loud where the water travels from there. A sewage treatment plant? A lake? Eventually our walk led us to an outfall pipe going directly into Fanno Creek. Ask the children what they are doing in this picture!
From this we imagined a “watershed address” for OES:

Middle School Roof

Swale next to Middle School

OES Parking Lot

Unnamed Storm drain

Underground Pipe

Fanno Creek

Tualatin River

Willamette River

Columbia River

Pacific Ocean

Next week we will be exploring many features of our watershed:

- What are the uses (and abuses) of our rivers?

- Who lives here and how do they depend on the waterways?

- How does the water cycle work?

- What is the significance of salmon in our region?

We encourage families to consider visiting an event this Sunday from 10:00-4:00 at Westmoreland Park, and participate in their Salmon Celebration. It is free and geared toward families.

Math Workshop:

As mathematicians this week, we put our work on multiplication to good use to explore the possible dimensions for our poetry quilt. We knew we had 36 tiles to arrange and we used our math skills to consider all the different arrays that we could make. In the end, we decided on a 9 x 4 array. This work gave us the opportunity to talk more about prime, factors, multiples and composite numbers, hidden arrays, and square numbers. We then applied our thinking to larger numbers and solved story problems.

Ask your child about the first Math Forum this week where they highlighted the connection between multiplication and division! They shared their thinking with the class by making a poster.

Reading:

We read a few more chapters of the book Tiger Rising and the question about fitting in came up in our conversations. This had us wondering whether it was better to fit in or stand out. Multiple perspectives were shared and connections were made to the characters in the story… Ask your child about his/her thoughts on this topic.

Writing/Spelling/Word Study:

Grammar/Writing: Reviewed nouns
and verbs. Ask your child about the Noun/Verb poem he/she is working on.
Spelling: Ari Sternberg placed the children in four flexible groups based on the spelling inventory/assessment that they did last week. Ari and I rotated between the four groups. Ask your child about the work we did in spelling this week.

Acolyting:

Our class will serve as acolytes in chapel for the next couple of weeks. Lower School students in Primary through 4th grade have the opportunity to serve as acolytes for at least one chapel every year. Most children enjoy this voluntary experience. Parents are always welcome to attend chapel and photograph their children when they serve as acolytes. Chapel starts at 8:10 a.m. on Tuesdays.

9/26	Lucy, Dianna, Jonah, Stu, Jake, Jacob
10/3	Evie, Katie, Selin, Lucas, Griffin, Hayden
10/10	Annie, Abigail, Jot, Maija, Kamran

Coming Up:

Sept. 18	- Fourth Grade Team Building Day (after lunch)
Oct. 6	- Homecoming
Oct. 13	- PGD day, No School
Oct. 18	- Field Trip to Oxbow Park
Oct 19	- Field Trip to Bonneville Dam

Dear Families,

Our first full week back was quite busy. We started the week welcoming the Class of 2018 at the Bell Tower as they made their traditional Senior Entrance at 8:00 A.M! The theme was “Good Vibes” and throwing candy for everyone was a big part of this exciting event.

Curriculum:

Math:

The children did the baseline assessment for fourth grade.
Among the math routines introduced this week were problem strings. A problem string is a series of related problems designed to elicit a specific strategy or introduce a specific model. Students solve the problems independently, and the teacher records their thinking in a way to make it visible to all.
We also investigated the relationship between multiplication and division utilizing open number lines, ratio tables, tile array and area models. Ask your child about the Ripped Crayon Box problem!
We will have our first “math forum” soon…stay tuned.

Writing /Social Studies:

What are the gifts I bring to my community?
What does it mean to be part of a community?
How does being in a strong community help us to take risks and learn?
What are the possibilities when our minds come together?

We have been exploring these questions through conversation, reading, writing, poetry and art. We started with an in-depth look at Eloise Greenfield’s By Myself. We read and reread the poem as a class and students considered the meaning of each line. We illustrated lines that jumped out to us and dissected lines like “I am a room full of toys” to imagine the figurative meaning. Some ideas students generated include:

I am one among many and neglected and not valued
I am lonely and waiting to be noticed
I am waiting for someone to invite me to play
I have too much and do not appreciate what I have

Students then collected ideas for their own poems from the “I Am A…” list they generated about themselves. Exploring the questions…. What do I want people to know about me? What is obvious and what is hidden?... we used Eloise Greenfield’s work as inspiration to find figurative ways to describe ourselves.

While this work helped us to learn about each other, there was still the work of thinking about how we would like to function as a community. To complement our poetry about ourselves we talked about ways we might express what it means to come together as a class for learning? To do this we turned to watercolors. Students each mixed a color that somehow reflects them and set to work creating abstract paintings on shared papers while enjoying some music in the background. As students sought to express themselves on shared watercolor paper, the nature of watercolor took over and started blending together in unexpected ways. Quickly, issues common to collaboration sprang up, which made for some lively conversation after we cleaned up, such as:

"When two colors mix, it is like putting two different ideas together and coming up with one awesome idea."
"It is nice to have our own special color because each one of us have our own spot in the painting that we can see."
"We learned to be careful with paint and made sure there was enough paint for the other classes."
"The colors blend nicely together just like how all the people in a community need to blend together.”

The children have done the second draft of their poems. We hope to finish writing our final copies early next week; this poetry and painting work will be on display in the form of a paper patchwork quilt by the end of next week. Please stop by and check it out if you are in school!

The poetry and art we did in the morning led us to our next big conversation in the afternoon to set a tone of collaboration and mutual respect.

each one of us shared what we wanted our classroom to be like
we made a list of all the ideas
we grouped our ideas into categories

Next week we will work on the wording and finalize our Class Agreements.

Students took the 4th grade spelling assessment this week.
We didn’t “personalize” our writer’s notebook covers with photos and pictures that inspire us as planned because not everyone had their pictures in school. We will plan for this next Friday and please remind your child to bring pictures next week.

Reading:

We discussed Reading Workshop to give students an overview of the different components to our reading time.
As I mentioned at BTSN, we have started reading The Tiger Rising, which is a 2001 children's book written by Newbery Medal winning author Kate DiCamillo. It is about a 12-year-old named Rob Horton who finds a caged tiger in the center of the woods near his home. We talked about what reading intensely looks like... picking out all the details, stated both directly and indirectly about Rob. The children were quite surprised to see the long list of details we were able to generate when we took the time to examine each paragraph in greater depth; we also talked about the use of metaphors in writing.
We began formal and informal reading assessments.

Some other things you might ask your child about this week:

The ancient Egyptian number system
Music with Amy Rheingans
Setting up laptops in Technology class
Library with Lara Ingham

Upcoming Events:

Teambuilding and Respect Day:

Teambuilding and Respect Day with our Outdoor Leadership Coordinator, Tom Handel, will be on Monday afternoon. The weather calls for rain and so please be sure to send your child to school with rain gear and sturdy shoes so that we can spend a good part of the day outside.

Field Trips:

On Wednesday, October 18th, fourth graders will be heading to Oxbow Park on the Sandy River to experience a free flowing salmon stream surrounded by old growth.
On Thursday, October 19th, we are headed to the Bonneville Dam and Hatchery. We will tour the hydropower facility and learn about how the hatchery and fish ladder work.

We will head out around the start of the day and return before the end of the day for both these trips.

Our week ended with: