4R Experiences: Volume 4: 2 September 2016

What's new with you? Nothing, I just thought I knew that fact!

Some weeks are incredible and then there are ones like this... unbelievable! Through our hands-on experiences at the supermarket two weeks ago and this week's trip to the bazaar, our knowledge of food is deepening. The myriad of challenges and complexities of even simply buying food are coming to light. Students' inquiry into how food is brought to common locations (i.e. cars, trucks, planes), how food is made available to the public (i.e. along the streets, individual vendors, small neighborhood stores, bazaar, supermarket), the different opportunities that some people have to actually eat food (i.e. scarcity), how food can be a celebration of one's culture, and other ideas make our study complicated and wrought with complexities. Moreover, we dove into our food books with Ms. Tina's class, sharing our New|Knew facts. Discovery is on-going!

Our study into our number system continues to deepen as we learned a new activity that involved using the power of ten to manipulate numbers, so we could win together at 101-200 Bingo! Students used mental math skills with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and at times, division to help play.

Our writing pieces are in the final stage, publishing. Throughout the process, students have built the first entries of the Table of Contents in their yellow writing sourcebook. During the revising process, we learned a new acronym, STARE to help us. This piece we focused on "A" which means to "Add details"; so, we added five adjectives to help our read visualize our character's feelings and create vivid descriptions of our settings. During the editing stage, we learned CUPS and focused on "S" which is our spelling. We learned a neat strategy to check our spelling during a peer conference - reading the piece backwards and circling the words we could not read. The process has been fun, focused, and students are looking forward to publishing their first piece of the year!

To further develop our community and learn about a new app called Explain Everything, Mr. Evan (new Technology coach) visited us to guide us in the making of our project. Students are creating a unique video project that briefly introduces them, shares one important thing we all should know about them, and one goal they hope for the future. Creative and informative, we look forward to watching each other's videos.

Enjoy the week!

Homework this week!

Along with reading 20 minutes each night please complete the following. *Please note Monday students must bring the UOI notebook home and back to school the following day:)

*Monday: Find a processed food in your kitchen. Examine it closely. What does the label tell you about it? With that food in front of you, do a See (use your senses...), Think (what's in your mind...), Wonder (questions...) reflection on that particular food in your Unit of Inquiry notebook. Bring the food to school for Tuesday
Tuesday: Goldilocks/Spiders reading comprehension exercise
Wednesday: IXL Grade 4 Math B.1 & C.1
Thursday: Journey West, reading comprehension exercise

Friday: Find a swing-set your have never found before. Swing! Read, Play, Eat Healthy Food.