Wavepaint and Zumi's

We walked to the Wavepaint Gallery. Our class got a little tour of the gallery from Mrs. DiLorenzo. They had children's book illustrations on exhibit. We noticed that some of the rough draft paintings were different than the ones in the books. For some paintings on exhibit, we could see the picture from the book right underneath it. We went there because it is Authors Week.











After the Wavepaint, we went to Zumi's as a treat. We each got delicious ice cream (or sorbet). After we got our ice cream, we went outside and sat on the deck and ate our treats. It was a little chilly and windy out there. When we were done, we took the long way home by walking on the Riverwalk. We heeded (paid attention to) the river. It was an awesome way to celebrate Authors Week!

This is Aidan after eating his ice cream. Can you guess what flavor he had?


This is Drew, Sean, Sam and Clayton. Clayton was a little chilly.


These guys are at the kiddie table.

Yummy!

Discussing the splendors of lemon sorbet...

Author Visits

This week is Author's Week. On Monday, we had author and illustrator Grace Lin join us and share about her many books. She was such an enthusiastic and energetic speaker. We learned how she used real stories from her life to create her books. She keeps an IDEA journal with her at all times. She showed us how to draw a tiger for the Year of the Tiger.

Wednesday brought us a visit from author Julie Hahnke (pictured above). She's written three books and published two of them. We loved hearing about all of the extensive research she does before writing a book, as well as how she planned out all of the series books before she even wrote one of them. Julie shared how she learned about Scottish clans and their land and battles, her research about animals like a pine marten and luna moth, and she even played the bagpipes for us, and showed us her ENORMOUS sword...don't worry, it was a replica. Julie Hahnke was another inspiring speaker.



Thursday, we had another assembly with storyteller Valerie Tutson. She was amazing. She taught us songs and words from Africa and completely mesmerized us with her stories about Zora Neale Hurston and a boy who could communicate with rainforest beings. It was interesting to think about how stories were shared as entertainment and history before they were ever written down. Who doesn't love a good story?

Environments

To begin our study of Native Americans, we explored some regions of North America. Our class is going to focus on the Eastern Woodlands, in particular. The two other fourth grade classes are studying other regions. Once our environment was built, the other classes visited to observe and draw some conclusions about what resources in the natural environment would have been used to meet the basic human needs of food, clothing and shelter. Now we're focusing on how the Natives used the natural resources in our specific region, and the students are researching and building artifacts to exhibit. Eventually, we'll be exploring the period of contact between the Natives from our region and European explorers.

(This is a model of a muskrat.)

April 2 Marsh Trip

It's Been A While!

We've been so busy that we have neglected our blog. In the last month we have been building an environment for social studies, visiting the marsh, doing LOTS of math (fractions and decimals and percents...oh my!), taking MCAS, having book clubs, taking field trips and working HARD! I'll try to catch up with some pictures. There are more to come soon...

Peabody Essex Field Trip