Mining Songs by Caroline

There have been many things going on during social studies. We have lately been doing a lot of fun projects. I am going to tell you about one of them. It's called mining songs.

So first, we picked a tune to go along with our song. For example, my group picked Fancy. Next, Mrs. Mills (our teacher) gave us a text all about the miners and their lives and our group read the text together. After that, the groups made up a song that had words that matched what the text said so the song told about the miners and their life. Finally, we rehearsed our songs until they felt comfortable. The last step was to add a little actions to the song and show them to the class.

 

Precepts by Sal

Precepts are important because it's like a motto. It's a ground rule. It's something you live by.

They're also important because they tell you what to do. Not in a bossy way like your hockey coach, but a rule to follow. And I basically just said the same thing twice, didn't I?

And that's why precepts are important. Stay classy Jersey Shore.

The video below is of our class precepts.

  The video above includes posters of student-written precepts being read aloud by the student author. The class precepts were inspired by one of our favorite books this year, Wonder by RJ Palaccio. We've also just finished reading the companion to Wonder, The Julian Chapter. We highly recommend it for children and adults. It's a story you'll never forget. 

Journalism Celebration by Lucas

As the Tuesday rolls on, the Journalism celebration will take air at 9:30. When the celebration starts, all of the students are going to share all of the checklists and strategies to help us over the journalism unit. The students will send out a letter to invite their parents to see if they would go. Now that everybody is coming, it will be a great party. After they show their videos, the students will give the parents a good-bye and the students will get back to work.

The videos below are from the celebration. We are telling about a certain piece. Mine was about a 3 year old kid that had a sick dribble and an awesome bike. He also could slide down the slides at exhilarating speeds.

Author Posters by Marcus

Our author posters are important because they teach us what techniques the authors like to use. For example, an author I was studying used a lot of comparison & surprising fact or statistics.

The authors also teach by using goals. Goals are goals for the techniques. For example, help the reader grasp an abstract the idea (or describe/ show the scale/ parts of something).

Here are some pics of the author posters that we did in reading in fourth grade:

The photos in the video above were taken by Marcus during our nonfiction author study celebration. Each book club made a chart to teach the class about techniques commonly used by the author they studied and the goals for each of the techniques. Marcus compiled the photos into the video.

Fourth Grade Recess By Megan

Every day at lunch and recess time everyone likes to go outside and play games. Most of the kids at recess like to play 4-square. 4-square is a very fun game to play. For some people, it gets tempting to play when you get out or when you get someone else out.

Sometimes when people get really competitive and throw ''cherry bombs," it usually goes over the fence - and goes under cars!

Ralph Fletcher Visits Knollwood School By James

Ralph Fletcher came to Fair Haven Knollwood School in NJ.  He taught everybody in the school his writing strategies and how useless things can turn into great ideas.  For example, when he was a kid he wrote down the things he was scared of and he could write a poem out of each one of them.

He mostly talked about his childhood and how he had 8 siblings.  One of them died in a car crash.

As Mr. Fletcher spoke kids wrote down what he said and what he did as a writer.  Most people are looking forward to using these strategies.

 kids writing down Ralph's strategies

 

Ralph showing the kids some of his books

Knollwood Times by Braiden

A few weeks ago we started a journalism unit. I can see most of our class loves this unit.

I like: 1. we publish every day, 2. it's fun, 3. it's just...GREAT!

We have learned the four 4'ws - who, what, where, and when. We have learned to eliminate the I-voice (the I-voice is speaking in 1st person) and use 3rd person, we have also learned so much more.

We all have written great stories and our first story Mrs. Mills used as an example was awesome.

This is the best unit and I think we are writing amazing stories.

Oh, and my signature way to end my stories...

Stay classy, New Jersey.

This is the journalist checklist. We try to use all the things on the checklist in our stories.

This chart shows phrases and words that we should try to use in the news stories we write.

These are some of the amazing news stories kids wrote and chose as their piece for the celebration.