Summaries, Sentences & Spirit Day!

This week, 4th graders read three more chapters in Charlotte’s Web. After each chapter, they wrote brief summaries in their Reader’s Notebooks. They have also answered comprehension questions after most chapters.

Today we read Diary of a Worm which will be the inspiration for an upcoming creative writing project. Students noted that the book had dates on each page, was comprised of short entries, and told about the worm’s day-to-day activities in a humorous way. This will be what they aspire to do in their Diary of a Spider or Diary of a Pig.

To begin, they wrote rough drafts of their About the Author pages. Using actual profiles of authors in book jackets as examples, the students generated a list of topics they might include on their own pages: hometown, awards, hobbies, family, and more. They also noted that they’d need to write in third person.

We learned about the suffixes -able and -ible this week, as well as four new vocabulary words from the novel. They love racing to find words first in Dictionary Digs.

In social studies, students have been working with cardinal and intermediate directions as they navigate around maps. It can be tricky! We also began work in a map skills workbook.

They got up and moving when it was time for geography task cards. They reviewed the locations of all continents and oceans as well as their locations in relation to one another.

The students cut and pasted pictures of continents onto a sentence strip to create a study tool. In 4E, we had time to play a game with continent flashcards, too.

In Morning Meeting this week, the 4Ms enjoyed games of Agreeable Corners, Two Arms, One Arm, No Arms, the middle name greeting, and more. Charlotte also brought some corn for show and tell. She told us about getting to ride on a combine on a farm in Kentucky!