Pinnacle Academy 2015-2016 School Year
Welcome to Mrs. Petti's Fourth Grade!
December 2015 Highlights
(Please scroll down for more slideshows and weekly highlights.)
Highlights of Week 14: Nov. 30 - Dec. 4, 2015
Science: In our unit on weather, we are investigating and building weather instruments. When the students peeked ahead to coming attractions, Ian was so excited about the homemade thermometer pictured in our text that he went home and made one all on his own and proudly brought it in to class to show us. In class, the students teamed up to design, build, and test anemometers (for measuring wind speed). Our anemometers don't have gauges, but they spin faster in stronger wind, and we'll be testing them outdoors and counting the number of revolutions per minute in different wind conditions. Inside the classroom, the students tested them with a three-speed fan. Some of the teams are fine-tuning their designs for greater stability and ease of spinning.
Social Studies: With their national parks presentations nearly complete (please visit!), the students shared their presentations with the class on Friday. We agreed that the students could make changes to their projects during the weekend, from home, if they chose. (While every student had included interesting facts, some of the projects had not explained the natural history of the location.) The students also learned the names of the Rocky Mountain States, along with some key facts.
Math: We are wrapping up our unit on decimals into the thousandths. This week's activities included metric linear measurements. Students could be seen measuring classroom furniture, equipment, the doorway, and body parts to find items the length of a centimeter, decimeter, and meter.
Language Arts: On Monday, the students were full of stories about their Thanksgiving holiday, so we had an extended writing and sharing session to tell stories of memorable moments. Our writing work during the rest of the week emphasized revising, editing, and publishing several short compositions: on the holiday moment that they had described on Monday and two writings from before Thanksgiving: something that they are thankful about and how archaeologists use artifacts to learn about the past. We will finish revising and publishing these compositions early next week. In our guided reading groups, now that everyone has finished reading the novels that we've been discussing, we have been having "big picture" discussions about story arcs (the energy level over the course of the story), identifying moments of peak excitement or suspense. Some of the students in the Island of the Blue Dolphins group wished that there were a sequel to the story, and they began composing their own versions.
Highlights of Week 15: Dec. 7 - 11, 2015
Science: We had a very stimulating visit to the KID Museum in Bethesda. Each multi-grade group of students spent 25 minutes at each of four stations: making circuits, making a "Draw-Bot," making simple animations, and designing objects to float or hover in wind tubes and above a wind table. There was a lot of creative, thoughtful, productive exploration at each station. Overheard: "This is the best field trip we've ever had!"
Back at school, the students learned some new cloud terminology and made cloud identifiers. We tried to test the student-made anemometers on the first lightly windy day, but the only one that spun at all was the "hanging anemometer" with no friction. Some of the students tested their anemometers with the fan in the room, but several days of sitting on the shelf and the effect of gravity had taken their toll on the crossbeams made of straws.
We read about temperature and humidity. The students made simple thermometers with diluted rubbing alcohol as the fluid. The rubbing alcohol expanded quickly when the bottles were cupped in the students' hands. A few of the students brought their thermometers outside during P.E. class, and when they carried them back inside, the fluid rose so rapidly that it "exploded" out of the bottles in a few cases. We disposed of most of the thermometers at the end of the day.
Social Studies: The students learned some key facts about some of the Southwest, Pacific, and Rocky Mountain states. We looked over some of the information in the history bee study guide, took a practice bee, and took the classroom history bee on Friday.
Math: The students completed a Unit 4 progress check on decimals. We have launched a new unit on estimating and multiplying with large numbers. On Friday, we also made some simple polyhedra, using a compass and straight edge to construct a tetrahedron (made of four equilateral triangles).
Language Arts: We held concluding discussions on Island of the Blue Dolphins and The BFG. Several students are continuing to write sequels of Island of the Blue Dolphins. (The students gathered eagerly whenever Safiya announced that she had finished another chapter of her sequel.) We have begun two new guided reading books, Lawn Boy and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, which are shorter and easier reads than the ones we just finished, in consideration of the upcoming winter break. The students worked on revising, editing, and publishing some of last week's writings. We enjoyed hearing presentations of cat poetry by the sixth and seventh graders.
Highlights of Week 16: Dec. 14 - 18, 2015
Science: We made barometers by cutting the necks off of balloons and stretching each balloon tightly over a plastic cup, then taping on a wooden skewer and designing cardboard gauges. We made the barometers on a day when the barometric pressure was dropping and rain was moving in to the area. On the following day, we observed that the balloon membranes on some of the homemade barometers were curving into the cups (indicating a higher pressure outside of the cups) and the skewers were pointing to higher numbers on the gauges.
Social Studies: The students learned the capitals of the Midwest states and learned more key facts about the Pacific, Southern, and Rocky Mountain states. We held our classroom geography bee on Friday. Congratulations to Safiya (first place) and Sofia (second place)!
Math: We continued multiplying with large numbers using expanded form, arrays, and the lattice method. The students took a test on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts. Some of the students made six, eight, or twelve-sided polyhedra. Safiya administered before-and-after math quizzes to the whole class and taught half of the class to hold "power poses" just before the second quiz, as she collected data for her science fair investigation.
Language Arts: We continued our discussions of our new guided reading books, Lawn Boy and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Students had time to revise, edit, and publish recent writings.