4th Grade Creates Mixed Media Masterpieces

The 4th graders have been studying different types of figurative language.  This week, they created their own similes, metaphors, personification about the moon and/or the sun.  By writing them on watercolor paper, they were able to create some visual art using the watercolor paints.  You can see examples below.  (Don’t forget that you can click on the image for a larger version.)

4th Grade Learns about Figurative Language

Hooray – our blog is back up and running!  We had a short day this week due to Early Dismissal, so I am going to give you a little bit about this week and last week.

Here are screenshots of the incredible personification poems the students wrote to honor the veterans. Congratulations to Max H. on having his poem, “Thankfulness,” selected to be read at the Churchill Veteran’s Day Ceremony.

Here was Connor’s great summary of last week’s class:

“We started GT finishing our poems for Church Hill honoring veterans and soldiers. After that we learned about the one problem for GT 6th grade. So we tried to represent that by doing difficult math problems. To end the day we played awesome Zoombinis.”  

This week, the students started preparing for the Wonder League Robotics Competition and practiced identifying more types of figurative language.

4th Grade Works on Personification Poetry

According to our students, here is what happened in 4th grade GT this week:

Cristian: Today in GT we looked at some poems and tried to figure out what all the poems had in common/the rules of poetry. WE decided that all of the poems lines of words are linked to the main idea. We also decided that all poems have a rythm.

Connor: Today we learned about personification. personification is a type of figuritive language. it is putting a word as a living thing like what it thinks what it dreams what it remembers. to do that we entered the Churchill contest of poetry. we watched sad army videos about warriors fighting to give us an idea of the deep meaning of the sacerfices that the soldiers made.

Jordan: Today we played “Zoombinis” again but today was different because it seemed like everyone in class overcame a challenge in the game.

Here are our photos from our photographer, Connor!

 

4th Grade Creates Parallel Poetry

This week’s blog post is brought to you by Alex G. (writer) and Elizabeth B. (photographer).

Today in GT we did some more poem projects! We started in GT by getting paragraphs from the book Tuck Everlasting (which is a great book by the way!) that had figurative language in it (similes, analogies, hyperboles, things like that). Then we took them and typed them on google drive. When we were done we took it and turned it into a found poem which is just that same paragraph rearranged and put into poem form. After that we turned that found poem into a parallel poem which is the same format as the poem but isn’t the same words. After that we did multiple intelligence recording on google classroom. After that we did our stations. Those were really fun! Sadly after that we had to go back to our classes. Thanks for reading, Fourth Grade GT!!!

Shoutouts go to: Mrs.Paradeza, Mrs. Bailey, Mrs.McGuire, and Mrs.Mohr, Thanks for being great teachers and visitors!!

4th Grade Brainstorms Genius Hour Ideas

I am so thrilled to introduce our first student blogger, Athasi!  The following post was authored by her.  The accompanying photos are examples of some of the student Haiku Deck slides, as well as pictures taken by our student photographers. (Click on each thumbnail to see a larger version.)

Today we used the app Haiku Deck and had a contest of who could create the best example of personification. The top two that we voted on were “The ice cream was calling my name” and “The train screamed in the night”. We also read some more of Tuck Everlasting and worked on hands on equations. Additionally we started to  brainstorm ideas for things we want to research or make during our genius hour time. We also used websites to come up with ideas. one more thing we did was brainstorm and vote for the name of our maker studio in the classroom next door. Some of the names we came up with were The outside of the box, Creativity HQ and Creation Station.

Goodbye, Jeffrey. Hello, Scully!

If you know a 4th grade GT student, you probably have already gotten the news.  Our tarantula, Jeffrey, went back to Region 20 today.  In his place, we are borrowing a ball python named Scully.  You can see some of the pictures of Scully taken by our class photographers (Deuce, Richard, and Emmett) below.

Scully appears to be close to shedding his skin, so that should be an interesting experience for the students!

Despite the excitement about our temporary new addition, we were still able to get some work done today.  The students continued to learn to identify different types of figurative language in Tuck Everlasting by adding examples to this “Padlet” using the iPads.  They also worked on Hands-On-Equations, and more coding with the Kodable Pro app.

We have the good fortune of being able to test Kodable Sync right now, which allows the students to use any iPad with Kodable Pro to continue through the Kodable levels.  If you have Kodable Pro at home, let me know, and I will set you up with the Sync account there, too.  (Our entire family spent the evening playing Kodable Pro the other night – so I can attest that it appeals to many age levels!)

 

4th Grade Works on Figurative Language

4th grade began to read the novel, Tuck Everlasting, today.  Natalie Babbit, the author, is famous for her use of figurative language, so the students learned about similes, hyperboles, metaphors, and personification today.  They chose some examples of these, and created images with quotes from the book in Haiku Deck.  You can see some of the examples below, as well as pictures taken by one of our class photographers, Emmett.  Click on any picture to see a larger version.

We also worked more on programming, and began our Hands-On-Equations unit.