Reading in Grade 4

In Grade 4, we have been spending a lot of time reading. 

During DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time, we read our independently chosen books every day!

As you can see from the chart above, just adding 10 minutes of reading time a day can have an amazing impact on our exposure to words and therefore our academic lives!

While we read, we try to notice and note these "signposts" below. 

When we notice these signposts, we stop reading and ask ourselves a key question to help us comprenend the text at a deep level. 

Our answers help us with many important skills as readers such as making connections, predicting and inferring, and thinking about the plot, theme, and conflict. 

Take Contrast & Contradiction as an example. 

When we are reading and a character says or does something that's opposite of what we would expect, we stop and ask "Why is the character acting this way?"

The answers could help us make a prediction or inference about the plot and/or conflict. 

We practice these skills not only during DEAR time but also during our daily read-alouds. 

In order to choose the book for our next read-aloud, we had a tournament of books!

Every day, we watched book trailors and read book reviews to help us make our choices between two books. 

Scar Island by Dan Gemeinhart was crowned as the 2018 Book of the Year with the runner-up being Crenshaw by Katherine Applegates!

These are all brand new books which have recently been purchased for the school library. Feel free to check them out yourself!

In addition to our daily read-alouds, we have also started having weekly book clubs. For our first book, we decided to read Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Stone by Rob Lloyd Jones through a class vote. 

During the book clubs, we discuss the questions that we came up with ourselves. We make sure we always back up our opinions with textual evidence. 

Here is a book club in action from this week! Check out the lively discussion!

With all of this reading, we finally reached our goal of reading 250 books last week! 

We had an awesome party to celebrate our major accomplishment!

We then set our new goal to read 500 books by the end of the school year!

We are quickly becoming a community of readers as students from other classes and teachers are continuously joining this challenge. 

If you are interested to start your own reading chain, just come talk to any of the Grade 4 readers!

Exploring the Elements of Art Through Photography

In Grade 4, we explored the elements of art through photography! 

We learned to take interesting photos by considering the compositions (rule of thirds, centered) as well as the angles (high angle, low angle, eye-level).

Then, each Grade 4 photographer edited a chosen photograph in many ways,

focusing on a different element each time.

In order to do this, we used a website called Polarr.

Take a look at our exploration of color, line, value, texture, and shape!

Photo taken by Pierre 

(before editing)

Edited: Color

Edited: Line

Edited: Texture

Photo taken by Anna

(before editing)

Edited: Color

Edited: Texture

Edited: Value

Photo taken by Louis

(before editing)

Edited: Color

Edited: Texture

Edited: Value

Photo taken by Skye

(before editing)

Edited: Color

Edited: Shape

Edited: Value

Photo taken by Urara

(before editing)

Edited: Value

Edited: Shape

Edited: Line

Photo taken by Jagnoor

(before editing)

Edited: Line

Edited: Color

Edited: Shape

Photo taken by Gabriel

(before editing)

Edited: Color

Edited: Value

Edited: Shape

Photo taken by Kiely

(before editing)

Edited: Texture

Edited: Line

Edited: Shape

Photo taken by Shii

Don't forget to take a look at the display in front of the school entrance!

Math Mini Exhibition

Over the past few weeks, we have been working on inventing various strategies to help us mentally solve addition and subtraction problems. 

Using such strategies helps us think flexibly about numbers rather than simply memorising the steps.

Today, we invited the whole school to come learn our strategies from us. 

Taking on the role of teachers helped deepen our level of understanding of numbers!

We set up our displays and...

We were ready to teach!

Let us know if you come up with any new strategies!

Accountable Talk / Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset

In Grade 4, we have been improving our communication skills by having discussions using "accountable talk" sentence starters. 

These sentence starters help us actively share and respond to other people's ideas to build our understandings about various topics. When we are accountable for what we say, we support and defend our claims with evidence.  

In the video below, we read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein and came up with our own discussion questions.

When we use accountable take to discuss books, we are improving our oral language skills as well as our reading comprehension skills by connecting,  predicting, inferring and visualising!

Below, we are discussing the differences between having a growth mindset and fixed mindset.

Take a look at the video and the poster below to find out more about these concepts!

On another note, today we had a celebration party since we reached our goal of reading 100 books as a class! Each one of these chains represents a book that was read by a student. 

Our next goal is to read 250 books by the end of the school year. 

If you are interested in participating and starting your own chain, please come by to speak to Miss d'Amours! 

Genius Hour Part 2

Continuing on from our previous post, here are links to our wonderful Genius Hour presentations!

Topic: Learning about the Sun

Topic: How to perform tricks using a football

Topic: How to draw a Labrador Retriever 

We hope you've learned something new!