Snowy Day on Monday...

Gingerbread Houses

This afternoon, we made gingerbread houses with the preschool class. The fourth graders were such great role models for the younger kids. We had such a fun time!

Look for more pictures on the Grade Four website, under Miss O'Reilly's page.

December 7, 2009

Today, a convoy from Maine came by Winthrop School. There are lots of wreaths that were made in Maine and are being delivered to Arlington National Cemetery. They are going to be put on graves there. There were police cars, motor cycles, 18-wheelers and every vehicle that was participating had a wreath on the front. Our whole school went outside holding flags to show respect for what they are doing. It was a patriotic thing to do.


In math today, we did two journal pages of partial products and estimating. Partial products is a strategy we use to multiply higher numbers. Here is an example:


Partial products is pretty easy to remember. It helps us to practice our facts because there are tons of facts in one problem. We probably will be able to do a shorter version of this when we are older. Partial products is kind of fun. If you don't understand how to do partial products, just ask one of us or come find a seat in our classroom!

by Tommy and Aidan

The Week in Review

This afternoon, we made landform islands out of moon sand. We all had to make as many different landforms as we could. There were at least 16 landforms we could make. Flags said what type of landform was shown. We had fun making canyons, lakes, divides and all of the other landforms!


(Miss O'Reilly can't figure out how to rotate these pictures - sorry!)



Some kids made projects about skiing. Whoever does a project gets a pass for all of the ski mountains in New Hampshire for free. Hunton, Tommy, Patrick and Claudia were the only ones who decided to do it. Cowan and Olivia might have projects on Monday. Hunton's was a paper mache mountain. Tommy made a poster and Claudia made a little booklet with a map on the back. Pat made a timeline about skiing with pictures. It was really exciting.

Also this week, we read the books Orville and An Angel for Solomon Singer. We talked about the reading strategy of asking questions and learned about thick and thin questions. Thin questions are about basic facts and are like little noodles with no thick and creamy sauce. Thick questions have more meaning, take more thought and might not even have answers. Strong readers ask questions so they can be more keyed in to their book. They want to read more.

By Jillian and Nate

Our Short Week

What's New in Room 3:

Landform Posters

Our class made little posters that told about a kind of landform. Some of the landforms we learned about were delta, canyon, archipelago, and peninsula. We found the information by researching in atlases and on the computer. Each poster contains a picture of the landform, a good definition and tells two places where that kind of landform can be found. Landform posters look great on our wall!

Decimals

Today was our Unit 4 test on decimals. Before the test, we did some decimal riddles and we measured different Thanksgiving objects. For example, we had a paper turkey, string beans, a bag of nuts, some dried corn and a can of cranberry sauce to measure. We measured each object in centimeters, millimeters, decimeters and meters. It was a good way to review for our test.

Sequencing

In reading, we are focusing on sequencing important details from a text. We read some chapters from two books and we organized the important events in a planner. Then we answered questions about the chapters. The two books we used were Stone Fox and The Egypt Game.

Narrative Writing

In writing, we are learning how to write personal narratives. Personal narratives are stories that really happened to us. We started out with organizers. To learn about setting the stage and writing thoughtful endings, we looked at examples from picture books and told how they started and ended.

This was a fun, short week! Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

by Hunton, Tommy, Olivia and Nate

Our Busy, Busy Week

We had popcorn yesterday. The popcorn maker was not working well at the last school store, and so after someone fixed it, we tried it out. It worked really well! The popcorn was delicious.


Today we showed some of the first graders our retelling plays. We've been working on the strategy of retelling in reading, and we chose picture books to retell and then turn into plays. It was really fun!



This morning we had rock and roll Friday. We also had school store. It was a very busy day!

by SHANNON and Drew

Our Busy, Busy Week

This week in social studies we are making a map of our classroom. All the boys are in one group and the girls are in another. We measured all the parts of the classroom. The maps are going to have a map scale and a map key and a grid with an index. We're almost done and adding color to the maps.


One morning this week, each group got a thesaurus and looked up an emotion word. We made lists of synonyms on the white board. Then we wrote poetry about a certain feeling. We came up with really long lists!


Sometimes on Friday mornings, we put on music and dance to it. Today was rock and roll Friday, and lots of the kids were dancing. (The teachers were, too!) It was a lot of fun to watch. Last Friday was disco Friday (and our fall party).





Unit 4 in math is about decimals. Today, we made designs on hundreds-grids and then counted what decimal of the whole our design covered.



In reading, some of us are doing retelling plays. We retell a story from a book in a short form and we act it out.



We finished reading the book Bud, Not Buddy. It was our read-aloud book. Everyone loved it. Some of our favorite parts were the funny events in the book, the strangers who were so kind to Bud, and the way Miss O'Reilly read it in an accent.

This week was very exciting! We learned a lot. Who knows what next week will bring?

By Sophie and Claudia

We Went Exloring

This morning in math we broke into three different groups and used three different ways to practice our multiplication facts.

This afternoon, we went out to a little forest. It was next to the cemetery. We explored and wrote down our findings about that ecosystem. The parts of the ecosystem we observed were soil, plants, bugs, trees, rocks, grass and water. There was no grass. Our plan is to compare the information to the facts we get tomorrow at the salt marsh.

Emma shared an article that her dad found (thanks, Mr. Dawson!) about European scientists that found 32 new planets outside of our solar system.

That was our exciting day!

Tune in next time!

From Aidan and Cowan in Room 3

Solar System Walk

Today, we went to Bialek Park to make a model of the solar system. Bialek Park was a big spot that we could use, because the solar system is so huge. The scale we used was one step = 10 billion steps in the solar system. So our model was a very miniature solar system. We put the planets in order from the sun. Cones marked where the planets and sun would be. We put down a cone, then we used a chart to tell us how many steps to go to the next planet. At each cone, people shared facts about the planets that they had researched. As the distances grew bigger, we could only get halfway to Uranus, because we ran out of room!

After we made our solar system model, we played some fun games like snakes in the grass, blob tag, toilet tag and a pie game. We couldn't play on the playground, because there was some construction there. Walking back to school, we got lots of people to beep to us.

It was a fun solar system day!

by Olivia and Jake

Today was Science Day!