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: