Student Blogs 2015-2016

The new school year has well underway and this year's 4th grade students have begun their blogs.  Please take time to read them and post them on social media.  Feel free to make comments as well!

Please use the links located at the right to access student blogs.

Today the students of Emanuel Lutheran's 4th grade class wrote poems inspired by the work of William Carlos Williams. We finished reading Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, in which Creech references Williams' poem "The Red Wheelbarrow". The class then wrote their own poems. These are just a few of the amazing poems that were written. Great Job 4th Grade!

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

The New Born Baby By Hannah

so much depends

upon

a new born

baby

crying in the

hospital

in my mothers

arms

The Lonely Person By Lianah

so much depends

upon

a lonely

person

walking beside

a sidewalk

near a

railroad

The Pot Hole by Thorston

so much depends

upon

a pot

hole

in my grandmother’s

backyard

unnoticed in the

ground

The Dark Gloomy Hospital By Anastasia

so much depends

upon

a dark gloomy

hospital

a big thunder

storm

on the hospital bed

he lays

We Did it!

We finally did it!  Today we published our first blog posts.  Although we were all very excited, some students were also a little nervous, but I assured them that even though their posts were published, they still had control of their work and can add and change the posts at anytime. Now of course is the more difficult task of getting people to read our blogs.  This is where friends, family and cyber-friends will need to help us out.  I encourage you to like, post, tweet, and share our blogs as often as you can.  Take time to read and comment yourself as well.  Sign up for email updates so you don't miss anything.  I am anxious to see how far and wide their voices can be heard!

You can find links to each student blog listed on the right.  Please read them all and share...share...share

Student Blogs

Any day now our student blogs will be published for the first time!  We are all very excited about publishing our first blog posts.  Some of the students even have more than one post ready for publication.  We are waiting for everyone to be done writing before we hit "publish".  This way, no one is the first nor the last to publish.  I encourage anyone and everyone to read and comment on the blogs once they are published.  We are very excited to see how far our "voice" can be heard!

Einstein's Riddle

This week before Christmas vacation, I thought it would be fun to work on riddles in class.  It is a great way to focus on our language, reading and logic skills.  One of the student's asked if I had ever heard of Einsteins Riddle.  I had heard of it, but I have never tried to work through it.  It is really more of a logic puzzle than the language riddles I had given the class.  I looked it up on the computer and Thorston decided he wanted to challenge himself to solve the riddle.  He asked me to do the same, but working on logic puzzles while teaching a class in near impossible so I promised that over break I would give it a try.  After bringing the riddle home, Thorston and his mom worked on the riddle and wouldn't you know, Mom solved it!  It doesn't sound like much of a feat, but perhaps you have never read the riddle, it is quite complicated.  It is estimated that 98% of the population can not figure the riddle out.  Now I know where Thorston gets his intelligence from!  Great job Mom!

This however was not enough for Thorston so he brought in the chart that he was using to figure put the riddle, and sure enough, he did it!

I will keep my promise and work on the riddle over break, but I am sure it will take me a lot longer!

Way to go Thorston!

You can google "Einstein's Riddle" and give it a try yourself.
Let us know how you did!

Long Island Children's Museum Field Trip

Here are some pictures from our field trip to the Long Island Children's Museum.  We learned about simple machines and had the opportunity to visit all of the exhibits.  The students built building with blocks, played with bubbles, climbed the hanging "tunnel".  The girls had fun pretending to be news anchors and radio hosts.  Most of my pictures are of one group because the rest were exploring with their parent chaperons.  If anyone has pictures of the rest of our bunch, I would love for you to share.  We had a great day exploring in new ways!

A Lesson in Place Value Takes a Turn

     The other day we started a new unit in math: place value.  At the end of the lesson, we were using base ten blocks and some how we began questioning how many units would it take to cover our classroom floor.  We took our heads out of our books, left our desks and began problem solving.  Students counted the floor tiles and figured how many units it would take to cover one tile.  Very quickly they were able to calculate the area of our classroom in square units.  There were some bumps along the way, and they forgot to take into consideration that our classroom is not a simple rectangle.  The calculations were not perfect, but together we discovered that it would take over 600,000 units to cover our classroom floor!

Students counting floor tiles