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!

Tuesday, August 28th

Today we learned some facts about Kansas.
We played Beat The Teacher in math. It is a place value game. Mrs. Goertzen lost every time.
We made our Humpty Dumpty contraptions. (Tomorrow we are each going to make up a name for our invention, and then we are going to walk to the high school and drop them from the top of the bleachers!)
We added two new words to our Vivid Vocabulary board - they are "fidget" and "linger".
We talked about the 3 ways to write a number - in standard, word, and expanded form! (Note to parents - this would be a GREAT thing to ask your kiddo about!)
Today we beat our stamina record in Read To Self time - we read for 13 minutes without any interruptions!  :)
We have homework tonight - everyone is supposed to ask his/her grown-ups where his/her ancestors came from. We are going to start talking about settlers and immigrants.
And we talked about 3 of our spelling words - "there, their and they're". We talked about tips for remembering which one is which.

Humpty Dumpty & Google Earth

Today was an AMAZING day in 4th grade here at BGS! This morning started with our 1st Readers Friends time in the library with our kindergarten buddies. And then we got to go to the high school to "investigate a crime scene" - it appears that Humpty Dumpty tried to sit on the top of the bleachers and did indeed fall! We found a crime scene taped off under the edge of the bleachers, and we used our scientific investigation skills to guess what happened.
Tomorrow, students need to bring any recycling-type materials from home that they want to use to build their egg-protecting contraptions - PLEASE DON'T BUY ANYTHING. The kids have only tomorrow to create their inventions, and must do all work at school, using only trash/recycling type supplies.
On Wednesday, we will be going back to BHS to drop our eggs from the top of the bleachers!
AND we got to use Google Earth today to look at our homes!

Thursday, August 23rd

We had a wonderful day in 4th grade!
We started our day with getting some math & reading placement tests out of the way, so that we could spend the rest of the day doing fun learning!
We worked on subtracting with regrouping, which was more fun because we got to use whiteboards and markers!
We got to hear a speaker talk about Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. We practiced a few kinds of math graphs about farm animals.
We had ART and we made pretend canteens to share with our Readers Friends next week!
We each wrote a list of adjectives to describe ourselves.
We got to work on our stamina reading!

Welcome to Camp BGS 2012!

Hello all!
It's the start of another wonderful school year, and I'm having fun getting our classroom ready for students to start exploring. It's always so motivating to start working in the classroom, decorating (we have a camping theme this year) and thinking about the best ways to teach our curriculum.  I love the things that we explore in 4th grade - I think that we are going to start this year learning about Kansas history and immigrants, place value and math facts, states of matter (melting things!) and reading all kinds of amazing books and magazines!
Can't wait to see you all in just a few days!
Mrs. Goertzen

Link to the 4th Grade Handbook

Today was a great Friday in 4th grade! We got to walk to the high school to watch a portion of the district 6th grade track meet, we had banana splits as someone's birthday treats, and we got to flick marshmallows on the playground as a mini-catapult contest! Check out the fun photos of our creations!

Today was a great day in 4th grade! We finished up our Keynote presentations about Native American tribes, had library lessons, played with a fun new toy called "foxtails" in p.e., learned more about adding and subtracting mixed numbers in math, tried new kinds of veggies in ranch dip, and did some experiments with shooting marshmallows out of our catapults on the playground!

Hello all, We made another delicious snack this afternoon as part of our Power Panther Pals nutrition mini-unit. Today we worked in small groups to make bowls of fruit salsa - apples, bananas, kiwi, strawberries and blueberries in a sugar/cinnamon/nutmeg sauce. Yum!

Today we made "apple smiles" as a snack - with red apple slices, peanut butter and marshmallows.

We used the leftover marshmallows in science this afternoon - we made marshmallow CATAPULTS! I can't wait to use them for some more experiments tomorrow as we play with the ideas of velocity and force to try to hit targets!

Word War 3

So for the past month, our class has been participating in Word War 3 with the other 4th grade class. We began on the first day of state assessments, and decided to have a little friendly competition to see which class could read the highest number of words in AR books for the next month. Each Friday afternoon for the past month, we have had whole-grade meetings to update our current totals and encourage reading. Our "war" officially ended this past Friday afternoon, and yesterday Ms. Jameson and I shared the final word counts with our very excited 4th graders. Ms. Jameson's class read more words than our class, but we're so proud of all of our students for their love of reading and for how fantastic they have been about encouraging each other to read fabulous books. Few things make me feel more warm-and-fuzzy than to hear one of our students recommending a book that "you've gotta read" to another student! Our final official combined 4th grade word count for the past four weeks is astonishing - I would NEVER have guessed that this would be our total: 3,351,010 words Amazing! Mrs. Goertzen

Friday, 4/20/2012

We have been doing all sorts of work with fractions this week, and this afternoon we are creating art with fraction tiles! I can't wait to post pictures of the artwork later today!
Yesterday afternoon, after spending about an hour working with comparing fractions that have unlike denominators, our brains were a little fried. So we made big paper airplanes and went onto the playground to fly them in the wind. Check out our fun:

Newsletter 3/12/12

Hello all!
It's been ages since we've updated our class blog - I've only been at school for a day or two here and there, and blogging always seems to get pushed to the side! I'm at school almost every single day for the next month - I think I'm only gone 4 days - so hopefully we'll get back on track!
I am attaching a copy of the newsletter that is going to go home with students tomorrow (Monday, 3/12/12). The newsletter has information about school picture day this week and also about assessments. We begin our first round of assessments next week. The following week is Spring Break, then we have math assessments the week after Spring Break. Then we have a week of down time, and then we take the science assessments. And then we are jumping right into my two favorite projects of the whole 4th grade year: Native American tribe studies, and The 50 States (where each child gets to focus on a specific state). I love our end of the year time and can't wait to get through assessments to jump into some longer-term projects.

Mrs. Goertzen

Mrs. Goertzen's Trip to Topeka

Hi Class! I've missed you all so much while I've been gone, but I've been taking pictures of the interesting things I'm seeing here in Topeka so that I can show you! I'm going to attach some pictures of the Senate (inside of the Capitol building in Topeka). I even got to have my picture taken sitting at the Governor's desk!
I can't wait to see you on Thursday!
Mrs. Goertzen

Tuesday, 1/10/2012

Today we looked at Native American pictures that came in the trunk from the Kansas State Historical Society. They showed things like tipis, chiefs, homes, prairie sleds, etc. We also got to pass around a buffalo shoulder blade, a buffalo skin-scraper made from a deer leg bone, a pipe, and a mat made of woven pumpkin.

Today we started writing about if we were featured on the front of TIME magazine in the future.

We took a short test in math about shapes.

We improved our class average on our addition timed test up to 94%. When we get to 95%, we get a class CELEBRATION! We are so close!

Monday 1/9/2012

Today we got to open one of the Traveling Trunks from the KS State Historical Society. We got to pass around a buffalo bladder, a moccasin, a leather shield, a Bone Whizzer game, porcupine quills, and a parfleche (like a purse made of buffalo hide). It was awesome and stinky!

Math - Lattice Multiplication Instruction Videos!

Today in class we were reviewing 2 digit multiplication, and talking about the different methods of finding the answers. One method that we've learned is called lattice multiplication. The kids were telling me today that their parents didn't know how to do lattice multiplication, so... we MADE instructional videos!
They are posted on our class wiki at www.goertzensguidebook.wikispaces.com. Just click on "Math".