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: