Monday 2/22/10

Hello everyone,
We are entering a rather crazy week - conferences, Personal Safety Awareness classes, and water cycle projects. I can't wait to share the kids' projects with you - most of the groups have chosen to create a project to share on VoiceThread, so you'll be able to watch and listen to them. We have groups writing songs, making posters, creating a story about a water droplet, and writing plays - it's going to be great!
See you either Tuesday evening or sometime on Thursday!
Also, a reminder that we have "themes" this week for Read Across America week:
Monday - "Team Up For Reading" - wear your favorite team shirt.
Tuesday - "Fox In Socks" - wear crazy socks.
Wednesday - "Cuddle up with a Good Book" - wear pajamas
Mrs. Goertzen

Friday 2/19/10

Today was Fun Friday! That means that every student (today this was 12 out of 17) who had ALL of their work turned in, and was caught up on their Sunflower Reader (14 books as of this week), got to participate in a tessellation project. We have been studying shapes and transformations in math, so this was a perfect tie-in with what we've been studying. We looked at some examples of M.C. Escher's tessellation artwork and then created our own tessellation shapes from notecards. We have some amazingly creative artwork being created - check out the photos! The kids can't wait to show them to you at conferences next week!
This was a fun day to be a 4th grader, since we played a game in math class today on the Promethean board about coordinate planes and ordered pairs. The kids got to choose an image of candy from the grid, tell the correct ordered pair for the candy's location, and then earn that piece of candy. And then we had art class this afternoon, learning about drawing 3-D cylinders.
What a fun day!
Mrs. Goertzen

Tuesday 2/16/10

Written by Drew and Luke
Today we started our Common Assessment in math. There are 48 questions on it, but we are only doing 12 of them each day. This is our last common assessment in math! Yay!
We made a comic strip this afternoon about a folklore story called "Gluskabe and the Snow Bird".

We made a magazine cover about famous Kansans today. We used the website www.bighugelabs.com. Each of us is studying a different Kansan - ("I had Bob Dole" one of them says. "I have Barry Sanders!")

At the end of the day we filled out our agendas - there is a reminder that we have Family Reading Night tonight. And the Book Fair is open tonight during Reading Night.

Box Tops

Hello parents,
I want to thank everyone who sent Box Tops earlier this year. Our classroom earns 10 cents for each Box Top sent in. So far, we have used our Box Top money to buy TinkerToys for inside recess, a United States puzzle, flashcards, and playing cards for math games. This is particularly nice for us this year, since our classrooms have no classroom budget at all this year to buy supplies. I am hoping to use the Box Top money from this current round to buy hand sanitizer, air freshener, more outdoor recess equipment, and CD disks for each child so that at the end of the year I can put all of his/her projects on a disk for him/her to take home and keep.
This is our last round of Box Top collections for the year, and the representative will be picking them up on this Friday, the 19th.
Thank you for supporting our classroom!
Carla Goertzen

Tuesday 2/9/10

Today we created a VoiceThread about the geometric shapes we've been studying. We used shapes to make pictures, colored them in, then took photos of our pictures and loaded them onto VoiceThread. Then we each talked about the shapes we used to make our pictures.

Friday 2/5/10, take 2

Hello everyone,
I am going to add a video to this post of the kids during Science class today. We had centers that focused on the states of matter - specifically, gas (which, of course, gets a lot of humor in 4th grade!) The class had a great time blowing up balloons, inflating ziploc bags, blowing bubbles in liquid soap, using straws to blow bubbles in pop and water, and dunking air-filled cups in water. The videos show the kids working in some of the stations.

Your kiddo should have brought home a conference note yesterday, asking which conference times work best for you. This is just a reminder that we fill those time slots on a first-come, first-served preference system.

Also, just a reminder that we DO NOT have school on Monday - it is a Professional Learning day! Have a great 3-day weekend - see you on Tuesday!
Mrs. Goertzen

Friday 2/5/10

Today we did Gas Stations in science. It's when we had 6 stations and each station had something to do with gas (the state of matter, like solids and liquids).
Today we got Valentines bags and we got to decorate them for Fun Friday. We put ribbons, glitter, fabric markers, paint, stickers and other stuff on them.
In math we got to make Keynotes about shapes - we got to pick a picture off the internet and do the transformations to them - original, slide, flip and turn. We chose the Titanic and Gravedigger (the monster truck).
Written by Bailey and Cade

Thursday morning 2/4/10

Hello Parents,
I was not at school yesterday, so we did not get any posts added to our blog yesterday. But I realized this morning that there were some announcements parents needed to know:

1. I will be sending home a class list with your child today, for Valentines cards. Your child does not have to bring valentines to school, but if he/she wants to, they must bring one for everyone in class. We're working hard this year on showing good character, and we want to make sure that no one feels left out.

2. This Friday, for our class Fun Friday activity, we will be decorating valentines bags. These are fabric bags, and we will be decorating them with fabric paints, Sharpies, etc. Your child qualifies to participate in Fun Friday if they are caught up with Sunflower Reader (this week, they must have at least 13 books read and passed) AND they have all of their work turned in. If your kiddo meets these qualifications, they will probably be asking you about bringing fabric paint and/or Sharpies to school, as well as possibly looking for a valentines image to trace. I wanted to make sure you knew what we would be using them for! I will also be providing some images at school to choose from, but many kids like to personalize their bag with something they are interested in.

Have a great Thursday!

Tuesday, 2/2/10

Hello everyone!
I hope everyone enjoyed their snow day and long weekend! It was nice to be able to go outside for recess again for the first time today - although the playground is surrounded by snow, our blacktop play area has been cleared off, so the students can run around at recess time!
I wanted to let you know that although your student hasn't been bringing any Social Studies papers home for the past couple of weeks, we ARE studying that subject at school! As we do more and more of our activities online and as hands-on projects, it sometimes means that there aren't as many papers coming home. Many of these activities are graded, however, and you can always check their grades at any time on PowerSchool. We have been creating Kansas objects lately in social studies, and we have created models of sod houses, covered wagons, tepees, and buffaloes. All of these objects are currently on the walls of our classroom and hallway, but they will be coming home soon! I'm planning to post some photos of our creations on Thursday.
Also, I got some interesting information about an opportunity for Wednesday, February 3 - the International Space Station's line of orbit will pass directly over our area for one pass, and we will be able to see it clearly if the skies are clear. It will pass for a 5-minute time span, from 7:13 - 7:18, traveling from SW to NE. My family got to see it the last time it's orbit crossed our path in an evening, a few weeks ago, and it was pretty interesting - it looks like a larger airplane light traveling across the sky! Isn't it amazing to think that we have astronauts living on the Space Station and that we can see their home from our yards!
Mrs. Goertzen