This has been a very productive week in Grade 4! We have learned three new morphemes and reviewed all our current vocabulary words. The students love generating words with each morpheme and creating pictures to help them recall the meanings.

This week, they also finished writing and typing their original song lyrics. The lyrics have been sent off to a professional songwriter whom we will meet on Dec. 16 at the Country Music Hall of Fame. That day, we will be surprised to see which songs have been selected and set to music!

The focus in language arts this week has been on paragraphs. We learned about topic and conclusion sentences, as well as ‘star ideas’ and detail sentences. We worked together to identify and color-code them in sample paragraphs.

We also practiced generating star ideas for paragraphs. Students were given board topics and they had to come up with three parallel ideas about which they could write.

Today, we put it all together after a lesson on character traits. I read Olivia, a popular picture book and the students had to come up with three words to describe Olivia. Then they learned two types of topic sentences they could use to begin their paragraph about her.

In addition, we read a chapter in Three Times Lucky, and students completed comprehension questions.

On Tuesday, we traveled to Nashville Children’s Theatre to see their production of “Charlotte’s Web.” Students were very entertained by the familiar story and enjoyed sharing their observations of creative decisions made about the costumes, casting and set design. We also enjoyed a pizza/fruit lunch back in our classroom afterward.

In social studies, we finished learning about the West region, enjoyed numerous state snacks, and made great progress on our state poster projects.

We enjoyed Campbell’s chocolate-covered huckleberries and huckleberry jam from Idaho and Leela’s biscochitos from New Mexico. Sophia brought homemade chocolate cookies for Massachusetts which were invented at the Toll House Inn. Another big hit was Colette’s blueberry soda from Maine.

Thank you to Will, Elliot, Anika and Amelia for serving as wonderful and welcoming hosts to our prospective students today.

In Morning Meeting this week, students enjoyed games of Hidden Clip, Poisonous Dart Frog, Mind Reader and more. We also had fun with the selfie greeting.