Transitioning...

We got a lot accomplished today as I'm trying to wrap up our 4th grade year. I'm moving at a quicker pace and trying to help transition them to 5th grade but they are pushing the brakes! If we don't transition, it'll be too much of a shock next year as 5th grade is super fast paced with a ton more expectations! Your child may be coming home with more work each evening to finish as they aren't getting as much time in class before we need to move on. No worries-I'm talking like 2 days instead of 3...for example, today, in Math Workshop, we worked for an hour and 15 minutes on lots of different things of their choosing. Tomorrow, they need to show me 2 completed tasks (they were given 6 different tasks) and in Science, we completed a lab on Tuesday and they had all of Science yesterday to finish up the questions and some time today too.

We started with M4T and I went around to help clear up any misconceptions they may have had. Some of them just need to ask more questions! Then, in meeting, I happened to quote a movie, like I typically do as I speak fluently in movie quotes so our sharing became their favorite movie quotes. Then, in Writer's Workshop, we met with our "team" to create our portion/article for our class issue of StoryWorks. We are at a really good part of The City of Ember, so they begged me to read more so I did and they still yelled at me when I stopped! I wish I could spend the day reading but there's other stuff to do! :) We didn't have a lot of time for Reader's Workshop but enough to write our Dear Mrs. L letters and read. It was raining so we had music, lunch and indoor recess. It took a while to quiet down but once we did, we discussed this final measurement math unit. The pre-tests weren't terrible so a lot of what we need to learn is more fine tuning some of our ideas. However, everyone needs work and direct instruction with the metric system and conversions. If you can, help your kiddo at home practice with conversions like minutes in hours, days in a year, inches into feet, yards, etc. These are ones that they "knew" just might need a refresher practice. We also worked with angles of a circle and within polygons so practiced applying our understanding of using protractors and what we know of angles (right = 90, straight = 180) to measure unknown angles. Next, we spent some time finishing up our lab on Oil Spills but then read in our Ohio text about what life in the new state of Ohio was like. We discussed new forms of transportation, immigrant settlements, public schools and religions. We ended our day with reading another chapter in The City of Ember. :)