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