Reading Strategies You Can Do at Home

We've been working on reading strategies here at school that you can use at home to talk about the books you are reading. They don't require any special materials, and each of these strategies will help improvement your comprehension.

One strategy is picking out story elements. While we were reading the stories Akiak, about a dog running the Iditarod, and Ghosts in the Attic, about a girl whose family helps fugitives move along the Underground Railroad, we talking about things that are included in every fiction story: characters, setting, a problem, events, and an resolution or solution. There's a fun way you can show these elements in a visual way. It's called a plot map, and it helps you see these important elements in order from beginning to end. You could use a plot map for a whole book, or you can even use it for a chapter in a book.

Our plot map for Akiak

Another strategy that goes along with story elements is summarizing what you've read. When you summarize you only tell the most important information, although we all decided we like to give LOTS of information about stories we like so it's sometimes challenging to pick out the important parts. Using a plot map can help with that!

Our first draft of our summary

When you summarize what you've read it means you're putting things in your own words and that shows you reading understood what you're reading. We do a lot of summarizing when we start our book The Boys Start the War and the Girls Get Even so we remember where we left off the last time we read.

The two other strategies we've been working on are predicting and inferring. Predicting is an easy one! You look at the title and the book, and you make a guess about what you think might happen. But did you know you're actually supposed to stop in the middle of your reading to see if your prediction is on the right track?? You are!! Then you can keep your prediction or change it to what you think might happen now that you have a little background knowledge about the book. We were all very surprised to know you're supposed to go back and see if your predictions are correct!

Finally we make inferences when we try to figure out why things are happening or why characters are acting certain ways in books. Another shocking thing we learned?? Authors don't always give you all of the information you need! Can you believe it? Well, they don't. So you have to read carefully to look for clues to try and figure things out. We had to do this in Ghosts in the Attic. Virginia thought there were ghosts in her attic, and she kept asking her parents questions and telling them things that were happening. Her parents kept ignoring her, giving each other glances, or saying things that didn't seem quite right. We had to use these clues to figure out that her parents might be keeping a secret, and sure enough they were!!

Each of these four strategies can help improve our reading comprehension, and they are easy to practice at home with questions like these:

• Can you tell me about the plot of your story?
• Can we make a plot map about what you read?
• Can you summarize what happened in that chapter?
• What do you think might happen next? Why do you think that?
• Why do you think the character did / said that? What do you think that means?

Exploring the Scientific Process

We've started off 4th grade science by taking a closer look at exactly how scientists have to be precise and specific when they do experiments to help others understand what they've done. To do this every scientist follows the scientific method or scientific process when they are doing an experiment.

We have taken a close look at the different steps of the process. They are:

• Observe - look at the world around you and notice things that make you curious
• Ask Questions - ask some questions about why those things happen, or ask questions about what would happen if you did something different
• Hypothesize - predict an answer to your question
• Plan - make a plan for the experiment you'd like to do
• Perform the Experiment - follow your plan to see what happens
• Analyze the Data - draw diagrams, take pictures, record movies, or make charts and graphs so that you can show people what happened
• Draw Conclusions - see what you learned, if you're hypothesis was proven, and how this could help other people; sometimes this makes you want to do another experiment

We did a different experiment to learn about each of these different steps. Our class and Mrs. Towsen's class developed our observation skills by trying to figure out what was in Mystery Boxes. We practice making hypotheses by trying to figure out what would happen if we put gummy bears in a cup of water for 24 hours. Our All About Me Bags helped us practice diagramming, and we surveyed our classes to learn all sorts of favorite things.

To see how all of the pieces fit together, we did a Water Cup and Paperclip Experiment. We talked about what we knew about full cups of water (did you know that water can actually go ABOVE the top of the cup??? How crazy is that!?!) and paperclips, and then there was a question. Mrs. Bair asked us, "How many paperclips will it take to overflow an already full cup of water?" Many of us hypothesized it would take between 5 and 10. Boy, were we ever surprised!!!! Check out these pictures taken by Woodner:

Getting started - many of us were already way off

Holy Moly! Over half full and still not overflowing!

Can you see the meniscus on the top of the water? 

FINALLY!!! It overflowed! You can definitely see how the water is over the top of the cup here!

It took 507 paperclips to make the cup overflow!! Mrs. Towsen's class only needed 178 to make their cup overflow so we talked about some variables, the things that might have been different. One was our paperclips. We had very tiny paperclips, and Mrs. Towsen's class used bigger ones. Another variable was the amount of water in the cup to start. Our cup only had a tiny meniscus so that may be why it took longer.

We had a lot of fun talking about our results and how far off our hypotheses were. Now that we completed this experiment together we are branching off and doing the same type of experiment on our own. Seven different groups are using different classroom materials to design and complete and experiment to learn more about water and how it works. Check back here at the end of the week to see the results!

Dot Day

On Monday, September 16 our class participated in Dot Day, a worldwide day to celebrate what makes us all unique and special.

Dot Day is based upon the book The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds. It's the story of a girl named Vashti who is just no good at art. One day after class her teacher asks her to just "make her mark" on her paper. The next day Vashti comes to art she finds her dot framed and hanging above her teacher's desk. From then on Vashti recognizes that she can do amazing things with her dots, and she even convinces a young friend to make his mark.

Our class talked about how this book wasn't just talking about art. We figured out that what the author was really trying to tell us was that we can make our mark anywhere and doing anything if we really put our mind to it. So that is exactly what we did. In honor of Dot Day, we made our marks, and now they are proudly displayed in our downstairs gallery for everybody to see on their way to lunch, specials and the walking path. We are proud of our dots, and we hope that we can make many other positive marks on Bear Creek.

Since you may not be able to come in to see our dots, we'd like to share them with you! Please enjoy our little Dot Day video!

Understanding Differences

As part of our weekly all school class meetings on Wednesday afternoons, the classes on Team Kit Kat had a special opportunity to learn more about understanding and appreciating differences. Mrs. Vosburg, our autistic support consultant, came in to teach our classes a little bit about autism and how kids who have autism are different than us. We were really interested to learn that sometimes our friends with autism have one of their 5 senses that works differently! Maybe things sound extra loud or things that taste yummy to us taste yucky for them. We imagined that it would be really hard having things look, smell, sound, taste and feel so differently.

Mrs. Vosburg also taught us there is a 6th sense!! It is called your social sense, and this sense helps you understand people and how they are feeling even if they don't use words. She told us that our friends with autism sometimes don't have that 6th sense so they have to learn it to understand how people are feeling. We imagined that must be really hard if you can't understand how people are feeling and have to wait for them to tell you. It can make for challenging situations.

We learned a lot from Mrs. Vosburg, and she shared that she has even more to teach us! We're excited that she's willing to come in and talk with us so that we can understand and be friends with all of the kids in our classes, on our team, and in our school.

Our Promise

As I mentioned earlier this week we spent several days talking about Bear Creek's Code of Conduct and what exactly it means to us. We talked about what a code is (a promise), and we discussed that conduct is another way to say how you act. Each of us picked one of the words in our promise and drew a picture showing what it meant to us. Here are many of the ways we plan on keeping our promise this year:

The Scientific Process

You might remember reading about how we worked with Mrs. Towsen's class to learn how scientists use observations and inferences to help them learn more about the world around them. These last few days we added another step to our learning about the scientific process: making a hypothesis.

When scientists like us make a hypothesis, they tell you about the research question, what they think will happen, and why they think it will happen. This means that all hypotheses should include an if, a then, and a because. To learn more about making a hypothesis we did a really fun experiment with gummy bears! Our hypotheses started like this:

If you put a gummy bear in water and leave it there over night then....... because.....

Our class was split into 5 groups, and each group got 5 gummy bears: red, orange, green, yellow, and clear. Some of us predicted the gummy bears would grow larger, while other groups predicted the bears would disintegrate (Yep! we even used that word!) in the water. Some groups also talked about the fact that the bears would change color in addition to changing size.

It ended up being a messy, oozy experiment because our bears definitely changed in just one day. We used our senses (with the exception of taste!) to think about how the bears were different, and our teams took measurements when we could to prove our observations with data. This experiment helped us see how important observations are when we are trying to prove or disprove a hypothesis.

Check out some pictures as we collected information to find out if our hypotheses were correct!

Wow! It was easy to observe how the gummy bears changed size just by looking at them!

EWWWW! Our sense of touch told us they got very slimy!

We still tried to measure them very carefully so we had data to support our observations.

And then we recorded the results along with our observations.

Our New Class Pet

Well, technically he's not really our class pet because he never came in the room today, but Peter the Praying Mantis gave us a lot to talk about this morning when he hung out on our windows for about an hour!

We are so lucky that our school is in such a unique location that we can see all of these amazing creatures right outside our window!