Vermont Geography

The fourth graders have spent the last few weeks up to their knees in geography! Ask them what that word means, they should be able to spit out the definition. We zoomed in starting from the continents, to our country, to New England, to Vermont, to Windsor county, to Hartford!  From there students started to take a closer look at the geographical regions of Vermont. Each student was given the opportunity to explore one of the physiographic regions more closely. The past two weeks they have studied the land-forms, the climate, and the relative and absolute locations. They also began to think deeply about how the geography of this region impacts the people that live there.

After studying each region, the students were asked to create a Glog. Glogster is a website that creates digital, interactive online posters.  They spent about three class periods learning to manipulate pictures and type in text into the site. These Glogs will be the basis of tomorrow's school wide scavenger hunt!

The class will be in their groups tomorrow and given a clue. The clue will direct them to a location in the school where they will find a QR Code that will digitally link the students to one group's Physiographic Region Glog. The clue card also includes 3 questions that the students will have to answer using the Glog as their text. Once they have completed that station they will return to class to check their answers and receive a piece of their Vermont puzzle.  Once the students have collected all of the puzzle pieces they will have one final question to answer about Vermont.  We are hoping that this fun and engaging activity will give students a chance to not only show off their Glogs to the whole class, but to also help them learn about other regions of Vermont that they didn't study.

Below you will find pictures of the process, along with links to the  students' Glogs!
I hope you all have a very relaxing and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday.

Taconic Mountains Glogster- Joseph, Fritz, & Isis

Green Mountains Glogster- Brody, Blaine & Kaitlyn

Vermont Low Lands- Lizzy, Colby & Sophie

Vermont Piedmont- Ava, William & Cameron

Valley of Vermont- Connor, James & Ceaira

Northeast Highlands- Austin, Ozzy & Darian

 

Fungi, Bacteria and Viruses...Oh My!

  Even though we only had 3 and a half day of school this week, the fourth graders managed to get in a lot of learning. 

  In reading this week, we started literature groups. Over the next few weeks, each group will be reading the same book. Students will discuss and work on skills specific to their reading levels and needs. Our focus will be to build higher level reading skills that require students to predict, infer, and analyze the text and the author's purpose.  Ask your child what they are reading in class. Ask specific questions about the story setting, characters, and plot. The more they can talk about their books, the more they will be thinking about them.  This pays off in the end. 

  I am so excited to report that the class is doing phenomenal on multiplying larger numbers. We use an array model that helps the students see how we can break down larger numbers into more manageable pieces that make the problems far less daunting. Take a look at the picture below. You can see that we took 14 x 12 and broke it down into pieces that students can easily do in their head. This may seem like a lot of work for those of us who are used to the traditional method of multiplying. Don't worry,we will get there by the end of the year, but by doing this method students can easily make the transition. Look at the photos below to see what I mean. 

Students first learn how to break up a problem like 14 x 12 into an array. Visually being able to see how they know all the pieces makes them feel successful, and they end up with a better understanding of multiplication and how it works. From there we move on to this...

Now students can see that the same parts of the array are used when doing multiplication in a more traditional way.  They can see that all of the pieces are still there. This helps keep them from skipping steps and getting incorrect answers.  It is a more visual way of learning the standard algorithm. Of course from there it is quite simple for the students to make the transition to the format we are all familiar with...

   This week we also finished up science with a mini unit on germs: bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa. We had the wonderful experience of having Dartmouth Graduate Students come to run an experiment with the kids. We investigated whether washing our hands with water, soap, or hand sanitizer would be best. The Dartmouth students came and collected each students' bacterial samples on Monday. We used petri dishes cut into 4 quadrants. The first quadrant students rubbed their unclean fingers, the second quadrant they rubbed the same finger that had been washed with just water. The third quadrant was rubbed by their finger which had either been washed with soap or with hand sanitizer, and the fourth quadrant was used for students to swab any place they wanted in the room to see how many bacteria were living there. On Wednesday the Dartmouth students returned with the petri dishes that had been in a grow lab for 48 hours. The fourth graders got to see the many bacteria that had grown. They even got to look up closely through this amazing microscope that gave them a wonderful view of their germs. Needless to say, I think we may have more students washing their hands on a regular basis. Check out the pictures below.