On Friday, the students created their very first blog post! There was a lot of excitement in the air as they tried out kidblog for the first time. Each student was successful with posting. Next week we will work on creating another post and comment on the posts of our classmates.
In reading we worked on the DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) that all students need to complete at the beginning of the year. Although it can be time consuming, all of the kids worked very hard during this time. We also talked about the importance of completing our Genre Reading Log when we finish a book. This will help us to "balance" the types of books that we are reading. We talked about giving a genre a "try" even if we usually read a different type of book.
In writing we started gathering ideas in our writing notebooks. We talked about how authors try to write about seed stories rather than watermelon topics. This means that we are going to write about small moments such as shooting the winning shot in the basketball game (seed) rather than writing about the entire basketball game (watermelon). This can be a difficult concept for fourth graders but they all started to give it a try. They will get lots of practice with this over the next few weeks.
Another highlight of our week was our second class "Paw Print" reward. The class earned a newspaper dance party. They got to dance on a piece of newspaper. After a few minutes they would freeze and then make the newspaper (and their dance floor) smaller. Most of the class needed a little encouragement at the beginning, but they got the hang of it once we had our dance "coaches."
I am looking forward to another busy week next week. We have a 1/2 day on Wednesday, September 19th.
~Mrs. Lewis
