ES Grade 4 Bloggers United

Needs and wants – what is the difference? What do you think is important in making a child’s life happy and comfortable? In smaller groups, the students listed 10 items that they thought were important for children. From the 10, they had to remove 3 which they deemed were not vital. The remaining 7 were then put in order of importance. This activity generated a great deal of conversation, controversy and some banter - the students were reminded about their the teamwork rules and agreements! As a follow up, the students then had a prepared selection of cards to sort out needs and wants. Please do discuss this exercise with your child. It stirred up some inspiring conversations about values which lead into why children’s rights were created and the reasons people work hard to uphold them.

How are rights upheld? We had a guest speaker who talked to the students about her job. Dr Angie Sievert Fernandez works as a volunteer with a local concern, the Kythe foundation – http://kythe.org/ . She is a psychologist who works with chronically ill children and sometimes parents of the sick children. Do ask your child about the many ways people work to ensure that children’s rights are respected and upheld.

We continue to work on our Twitter skills (we’re following favourite authors) with Mr McCallum; as well as maths, literacy and Literature Circles in class. Unit 4 is now complete and we’ve moved on to Unit 5 in maths, which is about big numbers, estimation and computation. This includes using tables and understanding division. Thank you to parents who investigated the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515 Truly big numbers and big problems. These real numbers will be used as part of our Child Rights unit of inquiry. Do enjoy these pictures of this week.

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This action packed week included the election of our student council representative for this semester, tuning in to our third unit of inquiry, wrapping up work on decimals, delving more into Literature Circles activities and learning to be Twitterers. Congratulations to Jenny on being elected as our second semester student representative! Thank you to Aneek, Sandro and Woo Suk, who provided good, valid reasons in their speeches for being elected. They were strong contenders! In our visit to the CMC, Ms. Pat read an interesting biography about the life of Gregor Mendel, known as the first person to crack the genetic code that has become so much a part of scientific life and ongoing studies. His thirst for knowledge and depth of curiosity as a child says much about one’s inner drive for discovery. In Literature Circles this week, we practised and applied the skills of a discussion director when composing fat questions and the summariser, who composes succinct summaries. The students composed emotion poems in Ms. Benesova’s inclusion class. In our work on decimals, we covered tenths, hundredths and thousandths – in fraction and decimal form. We also looked at estimating decimal sums and differences. Coming up soon – lattice maths! We thank Mr. McCallum for introducing us to Twitter. Please browse through our blog and join our twittering! We have more yet to learn about Twitter. We had a surprise visit this week, from …….. Please see our pictures!

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Wishing you a happy and safe new 2012! Welcome back! It’s great to see all the students back, looking so well, healthy and full of energy. We welcome new student, Asha to our class and The Philippines. During our first week back, we have been revisiting our teamwork rubric and practices. One of the activities to promote the best of teamwork practices was building a tall paper tower. Prior to this, the students worked on their communication skills to plan and organise their jobs. Please refer to the pictures below which illustrate the results of this exercise.

We launched our third unit of inquiry, ‘Child Rights’ this week. The guiding questions are:

1. Why do we need rights?

2. How are rights upheld?

3. What are the responsibilites that go along with rights?

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On 13/12/11  we had our systems contraption test with Mr.David and Mr.Niznik. It was very scary, that’s why some people’s contraption didn’t work, but Ms.Cooney told us that it wasn’t about if it worked or not, it was about if you were creative and if you were thinking about your work. Our contraption was supposed to pop a balloon, but it didn’t pop! It worked when we tried it in the testing. It didn’t work when Mr. Niznik and Mr. David saw it. They asked us lots of qyestions and some were hard to answer. Our contraption sometimes worked but most of the time, it didn’t work. Since Mr. Niznik is an engineer, he really liked our contraption, so did Mr. David. Mr. Niknik said that when you are an engineer you have to do and make hard stuff like the contraptions our whole class made.

by Wafia and Alex

We had our final design challenge. Two judges came to grade our project. Their names were Mr. Niznik and David. I think we did a pretty good job on our project. Even though on the day it didn’t work, it was okay because they graded us on presentation and creativity too. It was very scary to present our invention but after a while it was easier to talk. Our first design was quite complicated and nearly impossible! After a while, our design became less complicated and became easier to build. We had about two weeks to build our design. The most fun part of building the design was actually building our invention. We had one hour a day to work on our project. Our project was made up of 2 wooden boards, some dominoes, a little bit of cardboard, 3 toilet paper tubes,  a lot of tens blocks, some paper, a marble, a cup and a lot of tape! The aim of the game was  to get a marble in a cup. We had four simple machines in our contraption. They were the screw, wheel and axle, inclined and a lever.

By Pari and Zwe