A Boost for Back-To-School!

I am counting my blessings this week, and one of the things that I'm trying to really luxuriate in, is the fact that I have three more weeks of summer vacation! Since our school district is undergoing some renovations this summer, I have a little extra summer time! I've just begun truly digging in to school prep, and I found a great way to help embrace the back-to-school excitement:  a GIVEAWAY!  :)
Two wonderful educational bloggers are teaming up to share some resource ideas, and give away some Teachers Pay Teachers credit! Browsing on the TpT site always gets my creative juices flowing and jump-starts ideas for my classroom!  Here are links to the blogs and some more information about how you can get signed up, too!
The Science Penguin  
Teaching With A Mountain View

Friday was our last day of studying electricity and circuits this year. Our class has LOVED this hands-on unit and the freedom for each child to chose some of his/her explorations. On Friday, the kids chose to work together to make the biggest circuit they could, trying to use as many of our electrical supplies as possible!

 Figuring out the basics - including the fact that they are going to need to make the circle a little bigger!

 How many batteries can we connect? Notice the handful of alligator clips - we used every single one that we own!

 Here they are with their finished product! It's too bright to see the tiny light bulbs shining!

And here's their favorite picture - love those personalities shining through!  :)

Well, it's been AGES since we've posted here - we've been using Facebook to share our daily activities more than any other venue! But I wanted to share a little more about today's activities. We are just beginning our unit about electricity, and this is reminding me of why I became a teacher. The kids are SO EXCITED and they are naturally making wonderful connections to "real life" and talking about ways they can try the experiments in new ways! Hearing them say, "I can't wait to go home and try this again!" makes me love my job.  Our classroom has the lights turned off - the better to see the tiny lightbulbs when they light up - and they are working in teams. They are so focused and enthusiastic about this, begging to try new versions of the experiment tomorrow. I feel like this is what school should ideally be like - full of activities that your kids are interested in and that help them make connections!

Busy 4th Graders!

Happy Saturday everyone!
I was just working on our lessons for next week, and we sure do have some BUSY days coming up! Not only are we diving into some new academic content, but we have quite a few "extra" activities, too:
**Tuesday, September 18th: School picture day. Be sure to either send your picture packet back to school with your kiddo, or order online. Every child has his/her photo taken on this day, whether he/she brought the packet back or not, since these are the photos that are used in the yearbook.
**Wednesday, September 19th: Agriculture Field Trip. This is a field trip put together by the FFA department at Buhler High. We are lucky that our school is located in Buhler - we hardly have to travel at all on this day! We leave a little before 9, and go across the street to a big shed to learn about local farming. Then we go two houses down to a farm to learn about 3 other aspects of local farming. Then a bus drives us to the high school where they provide lunch for us - usually a ham & cheese sandwich, banana, and a cookie - and they have a little petting zoo for us and a welding demonstration. And then they take us to one last farm to learn about 3 more aspects of local farming. We are usually back at school around 1:15.  The high schoolers work hard to make this an interesting, fun experience for the district's 4th graders!
**Tuesday, September 25: Parent/Teacher Conferences in the evening from 4 - 8 p.m.
**Thursday, September 27th: Parent/Teacher Conferences all day from 8 a.m. - 8 p.m.
**Friday, September 28th: No school!  Home football game at 7 p.m. against El Dorado.
**Saturday, October 6: Buhler Frolic   Some of your kiddos have signed up to run the 1-mile Fun Run with me!
We've been exploring some new topics in class, moving on from the review activities that we started the year with. I can't wait to share with you at conferences about the new reading program that we are using, and about the new spelling and math systems that we are starting.  We have been studying Kansas in social studies the past week. Our standards have us studying the 50 states in 4th grade, and this way we can compare the other states and regions to the state we are most familiar with. Wednesday we made 3D tipis (your kiddo should have brought his/hers home yesterday) and they were FANTASTIC! Check them out:

Read To Someone

Today we started a new skill in reading!
Our new reading system is structured differently than a traditional system. In a few weeks, when we are done training and practicing the different parts, our literacy time will have 3 "sections" each day. Each student will have one or two literacy requirements for the day, and at least one section where he/she can CHOOSE which type of literacy he/she WANTS to do. Right now we are practicing how to do those activities independently, so that I can work individually with students on highly personalized reading skills during that time each day. So far we've been honing skills that most students have done before, in some form or another. But today we started "Read To Someone", which was so much fun! There's just something exciting about your teacher assigning you to sit down with a friend and share your book with him/her!  We start by practicing in very short time periods, to make SURE that we are doing everything just right, and then add time (we call it "stamina") each day until we get to the full 20 minutes. Today everyone got to read to his/her partner for 3 minutes, and everyone is excited about building our stamina tomorrow!

Thursday, part 2!

Yes, this is our 2nd post of the day! We were so excited about our science Comic Life this morning that we just COULDN'T wait to share it!  :)
We started our day with our weekly whole-school assembly. Mr. Bryan talked to us about being a good audience and showing character.
We made a Comic Life in science class about our Humpty Dumpty experiments. It was fun to look at the pictures of our eggs!
We made a stack of cups in math class to use for playing place value games about expanded form.
We read a really funny book called Sweet Tooth to learn about finding causes & effects when we read.
We practiced our Read to Self skills.
We did our first typing lesson on the Forte keyboards!
We got to play on the website CoolMath4Kids.com for a few minutes, because our writing lesson website didn't work!

Saving Humpty Dumpty

Check out our science experiment results!