Mrs. Sathyaraj's Trendsetters

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: