First Week

We all survived the first week!
I have to say, fourth graders may be bigger/taller than second graders, but they certainly don't have any less love to give! I was a bit nervous about making the grade level change but I am so in love with all my new students, I have no worries about it anymore!
Sure…. some of my students are taller than me, but they're still a bunch of sweet, fun-loving kiddos, ready to learn!

This week I really just focused on classroom management and setting up how we will be using our math journals.
Our school uses CHAMPS as a school-wide system.
For those of you who don't know….

Conversation: Can students converse during this activity? About what? With whom? For how long? 

Help: How do students get your attention for help? How do students get questions answered? What should they do while they wait for you? 

Activity: What is the expected end product of this activity? What is the task or objective? 

Movement: For what reasons can students get out of their seats during this activity? Do they need permission to do so? 

Participation: What behavior shows that students are participating or not participating? 

Success: There are no questions for this one. When CHAMPs expectations are met, students will be successful. 

I have a CHAMPS board in my classroom to remind students what the expectations are for a particular activity. It's a great tool and I love that no matter what classroom they walk into, the CHAMPS are the same.

As far as setting up the math notebooks…. it's all about problem solving skills.
I don't want my students to just write down the answer to a problem and move on. I want them to really dig deep!

I have six steps to my problem solving.
1. Reading the problem.
2. Underline the question.
3. Representation (picture, graph, tallies, ten frames, chart, etc.)
4. Number sentence.
5. Answer the question in words.
6. Explain your thinking, step-by-step.

About 3-4 times a week I will give students a short word problem to glue in their math journal. They then have to follow the six steps of problem solving in their journal. I walk around and give help as needed and take notes.
I was very impressed with how fast my students picked up on the steps and how easily they filled up a single page. :)

Overall, first week was WONDERFUL.

Schedule

Here is my schedule for the students who have me as a homeroom teacher.

Ms. Dower’s Class Schedule

7:20-7:40	Arrival, Breakfast
7:40-8:15	Intervention, Enrichment with Ms. Dower (room 516)
8:15-9:35	Math and Science with Ms. Dower(room 516)
9:40-11:05	Writing with Ms. Zelder (room 513)
11:10-11:35	Reading and Social Studies with Mr. Marquez (room 511)
11:40-12:10	Lunch (table two)
12:10-12:30	Recess
12:40-1:45	Reading and Social Studies continued (room 511)
1:50-2:40	Specials

Math Unit One

In our first unit for math, we are talking about PLACE VALUE.

How can you

• describe the value of a number based on its position?

• read, write, order, and compare numbers up to the billions place?

• use place value to understand the relative sizes of metric measurement units?

• use place value to read and interpret a stem and leaf plot?

If I say the number sixty-two billion, five hundred twenty-three million, forty-two thousand, seven hundred sixty-eight.... will my students be able to write:62,523,042,768?By the way, that above number is about how many things I had to do in a span of two weeks to get ready for school! A stem and leaf plot looks like this:


Here's a good video for an explanation. 
I love teaching about the customary and metric system... "Here's the America does things.... and here's the way the rest of the world does things...."

Here's one of the activities I plan to do... It's a teacherspayteachers freebie. :)

Stem and Leaf Plot Generator

Science Unit One

Our focus question for the first science bundle in fourth grade is:
How can physical properties be used to differentiate between similar objects? 

We will also spend some time going over safety in the science lab and setting up our science journals.

The vocabulary words for this unit are:

• states of matter
• solid
• liquid
• gas
• magnetism
• size
• mass
• temperature
• volume