I have typed up all the entries on the pile at the front. If you wrote an entry that isn't included here, please let me know and I'll upload it next week.
Have a great weekend!
Love,
Ms
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I have typed up all the entries on the pile at the front. If you wrote an entry that isn't included here, please let me know and I'll upload it next week.
Have a great weekend! Love, Ms
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The passion of the world... the amazement of all readers... The ONE, the only (drum roll please) HARRY POTTER! In class we have been reading Harry Potter. It has been a lot more exciting because of the accent of our English teacher, the famous Ms. Chown. She read 2 chapters and it was awesome. It sounded like Harry Potter himself was reading it. We also like how Ms. Chown has added so much emotion. When Hagrid cries she really wails! Some people claim that, "it has changed since I last read it." Ms. Chown suggests that we go back and check our books to see if this is true. A note from Ms. Chown I thought you might like to see what the English cover for the book looks like. As I said, there are definitely some differences between the English and American versions (apart from the title). I have been editing it slightly as we go along, so that you can hear the words that JK Rowling wrote. If you are interested in seeing what the differences are, then this website has a good list. http://www.hp-lexicon.org/about/books/ps/differences-ps.html I connect with Ava about the plot changes too, but I am convinced that it is my memory that has muddled things up, rather than our book being out of order. If, you have a copy of Harry Potter and the Sourcerer's Stone at home, have a look at the first couple of chapters and let me know what you discover. This week we have been playing different games at morning meeting.
At the beginning of the week, we played a warm wind blows. In this game we move around the circle to a new spot if Ms. Chown calls out something that is true for us. This game helps us to see what we have in common. On Friday we played a game called Alibi. This is a game that helps us improve our listening skills. It is a really fun way to do this. We also like to sing songs and make each other laugh so we always start the day by having fun. We are drawing plant pictures so that we can work on our observation skills. Everybody picked out a plant that we have in our classroom. First we sketched it and then, when we were finished, we mounted in on construction paper. We have pinned these up around our classroom so please come in and see them. Some people colored their pictures and some people did two or three drafts. Each time they did a new draft, they looked to see if there was anything else that they had noticed. If they weren't sure, Ms. Chown or other children helped them to notice. We had learned how to really look hard from doing our self portraits so our pictures came out great! This week was a very busy week. We have done everything from getting writing partners to reading to an alibi game to math. Those are just some of the things that we did!
But, we also had an important conversation about the blog this week. We decided that writing the full day was too much to manage every day, which is why we had stopped! This is why we have decided to write this in sections. One exciting thing that we did this week was change tables. After we did that, we had to find 3 things that we had in common so we could get to know our new tables. In our morning meeting sharing, we shared things that were important to us, like an angel that our grandmother had given us. I think you will agree, from reading this and the other sections, that this was a very busy week (well, at least I think it was This post is slightly out of order but we thought you might like to know what we did last Friday. At morning meeting we played a memory game where we had to look at different objects and think of strategies to help us remember them. Then Ms. Chown covered up the objects and we had to write down what we could remember. We think this game will help us remember instructions and our multiplication/division facts. We are going to keep having goes at this game every Friday. Then in art we were thinking about the senses. We used 12 bags to feel thing like wax, rock, onion, root, wool, wood, sponge, rubberbat, shell, oat and we used all of our five senses Our story was The Incredible Book Eating Boy. It was an interesting book because there was boy that ate too many books. Then when the doctor said no more books he started reading the books and he was smarter. After lunch we went to the library and read a book. The library techer showed us how to put the stick in the bookshelve that we took the book out of so we don’t put it on the table. When we use the sticks the librarians have less work to do. We are now beginning to finish our self portraits. The people who finished them are starting to draw plants and to use our skills from our portraits. So, in compliment club at the end of the day, we wrote nice things about people's actions on a piece of paper and gave them out at the end of the day. We really like going home with a compliment on a Friday. Here is the basic outline of our day. Rebecca and Alex will write in the details tomorrow. First we replied to the questions that Ms. Chown had written in our composition books. At morning meeting, we discussed sharing and made some decisions about how sharing will work in our meetings. After that we did a quick write where we imagined that we had woken up as either our favorite car or animal. After recess, we read Martha Blah Blah. Although the story ends happily, Ms. Chown revealed a terrible truth. Granny was still planning to take out some letters. So, in math, we were challenged to work out which letters Then we did some more work on our class rules. Just before lunch we used our favorite ideas from our 'I am' list on Friday, and edited this morning, to create a class poem After lunch we did 20 minutes of reading. Then we color coded the rules to see if they fit into 4 categories. Tomorrow we will finish off these rules. For the last hour of the day, some people worked on finishing their portraits, others used their new, observational drawing skills to draw our class plants. Happy Sunday Room 15! I just wanted to let you know that 12 of our self portraits are now uploaded to the self portrait page. If you have finished your portrait, it will be there. If you haven't finished your picture, it will go up as soon as you do. I will also start to upload our drafts soon, so that you can talk your friends and family through the process of creating these portraits.
I just want to say again, these portraits are stunning and you should be VERY proud of them. Your hard work has really paid off. Love, Ms. Chown To start off Thursday we organised our caddys. Ms.Chown wrote what goes where picture and list on the chart. (Our caddies should contain 2 pairs of scissors, 2 rulers, 2 glue sticks, a pack of stickies, 2 green pens, 6 sharp writing pencils, coloured pencils and markers). Then at morning meeting, for our greeting we tapped peoples arms and said good morning. We liked it because it got people's attenton. After morning meeting we did a quick write which is when we get a slip of paper with silly questions on it. We had to write it down in our writeing jounals. Some questions were:If I were a shape what would I be? What element in nature? What car? We thoght it was very intesting. We learnd things we didn’t know about ourselves! In science we learned about abotic and botic things. Abotic is not living and botic is living. Then we discovered tings on our desks like bones or coral . After that we went into the garden and looked for botic and abotic things. Then we sceched what we saw in the garden. A lot of us liked going outside for garden. For our story we read The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, which is a great story. In the story the pig tries to knock down the house by HUFFING and PUFFING and PUFFING and HUFFING. And didnt work at all. But they don’t cal him big and bad for nothing! You'll have to read the book to find out what he did. Next in Math we got some sheets with reviews of fractions and stuff on them. Ms. Chown needed to see what we need to work on. She is very excited by all the things that she will get to teach us this year. Later we worked on our rules. We had a grand total of 64 Rules for this year that we had to go over. The other day each group got a sheet and they got to write down rules. Then Ms. Chown wrote it all up on the board and covered it with the projector screen. We were amazed when the projector screen came up because we had come up with so many rules. In Self portraits we worked on the finshing touches. some of us even finshed! Some are almost done. We all really like ours. In PE we did a warm up game it wa s called cops and robbers evrey body liked it because it was fun . Then we played football. How we played is one preson had a ball then then the person in front had to yell HIKE then the person run out and clap to let them know then they would throw the ball At the end of the day we watched a video on you tube that Courtney showed. We loved it, thank you Courtney! Love, Ella and Olivia Our internet server has been having problems so we haven't been able to write our blog for a few days. Here are some highlights of what we have been doing. Last friday, we built towers. When we saw this on the schedule, we had no idea what it could be (it had also been on the schedule three times but we'd not had time to do it). In the activity Ms Chown challenged us to build the tallest tower we could with nothing but paper clips, 10 sheets of paper and some tape. The biggest challenge was that we weren't allowed to speak to each other at all. We had 10 minutes to build it! Different people started planning in different ways, some of us wrote to each other. Some tried to communicate using nothing but gestures. Damar and Josue took an early lead after they hit upon the strategy of rolling the paper. They soon built a very tall tower indeed. Here they can be seen pondering what they could do next. Unfortunately for this fantastic duo, their strategy of joining the paper with tape proved to be too unstable. Despite trying hard, they could not add that vital extra layer. Across the room, others were inspired by Damar and Josue's building style. The two teams on this table soon noticed that they could tuck each rolled sheet inside each other for added stability. Britny and Elijah's tower even made it into the Explorer News email! After we had spent 10 minutes building silently, we measured the towers. In order for them to be measured, they had to stand up independently for 3 seconds. Once we had our winners, we moved on to our next challenge. This was exactly the same as the one before, but this time we were allowed to talk. Our new towers were all taller than in round one. However, many people preferred our first round. When we hadn't been able to talk! At the end, we tidied up pretty quickly so Ms. Chown didn't even mind a little silliness. See below for the fabulous moustached 4th graders! We have also been reading some excellent books, including Sitting Ducks, Baby Brains and Robomom, and Millie's Marvelous Hat. We have loved them all. Baby Brains and Robomom was an unexpected treat. On Friday we found it in our school library and checked it out for Ms. Chown (who was incredibly excited to read a Baby Brains story that was new to everyone). Below is a picture by the artist Edward Hopper. Our challenge is to see if we can find the illustration in Sitting Ducks that is based on this painting. Ms. Chown thinks that it is incredible to see how this painting has clearly inspired an illustration - just like the way we love to use great ideas (like rolled up pieces of paper in tower building) from others in our own work. What do you think? The California Times - JuniorLast but not least, on Tuesday we decided that we would write a newspaper for Room 15. We brainstormed a list of class news and chose what we wanted to work on. The next day Ms. Chown told us about how we could use alliteration, exaggeration or word play to create eye-catching headlines. We discussed then voted on the name of the newspaper, chose our journalistic names (Ms. Chown was Editor in Chief) and interviewed each other for our front page spread on our class talents. Our teams worked really well but already we are thinking about what we could do next time - from interviewing speciality teachers, including different languages (our class knows Spanish, Swedish and some Greek as well as several other languages), creating illustrations, longer articles etc.
The California Times Junior is available from the Room 15 noticeboard. Please stop by to get a copy. Our next edition will be published in October. |
by Ms Chown and Room 15 Fourth Grade ClassArchives
November 2012
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