Over the past week, we have been reading our class novel, My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Gannett. The book is about a boy who travels to a mysterious make believe island in order to save a dragon in hopes of using him as a personal aircraft. Throughout the book, the boy runs into animals that threaten to harm him, but luckily, he’s packed odd items in his knapsack that he uses to get himself out of these dangerous situations with the animals.  After reading the novel, the students used cutting and folding techniques to create their very own dragon using a toilet paper roll. The students then worked in groups to make a sequel for the class novel. The twist was that they had to use their dragon that they made in class and travel our hallway which is a mural of the famous Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson. Walter Anderson is known for painting animals in their native habitats. The students found a painted scene in the mural for inspiration of the characters and setting of the story, picked an item form the knapsack that was used in solving a problem the dragon encounters, and developed a plot for the chapter their group was responsible for writing. The end product was a five chapter sequel creativity written by the whole class that was inspired by the novel, My Father’s Dragon, and the famous Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson, that we had been studying.

Here is one of our sequels below.

Once upon a time, there was this dragon named Bubbles. He went to Walter Anderson’s World. He first went to visit Butterflyland to get seven boogleberries for Elmer because he as sick. But he ran into seven angry butterflies, and then they started to attack him. He threw glitter on their wings. They stop attacking him because they thought there wings were beautiful.

Later that day Bubbles landed on a rock and saw an Indian. Then the Indian tried to shoot him with the bow and arrow, so he reached in his knapsack and got a skeleton. They ran away. Bubbles kept traveling and ran into rhinos.  Then Bubbles asked the rhino, “What do you know about this world?” Then the Rhino said, “I don’t know because I’m new to this world. I saw you scare the Indians with the skeleton.”   So Bubbles continued his journey.

Bubbles walked on and on until he walked into a beautiful spot called Alligator Swamp. “I am hungry for a juicy green watermelon,” said the alligator named Alliot. So then Bubbles kept walking into the swamp and he saw the alligator and the alligator saw him too!  “Why are you in my Swamp?”, said Alliot.   “I didn’t know it was your swamp.”, said Bubbles. “Now I don’t want a watermelon. Now I want YOU!”, said Alliot. “No, don’t eat me. I have something for you hunger,” he said whining.  Bubble reached into his knapsack and for some headphones. “What are those?”, said Alligator. “Something that gives you tasty food.” said Bubbles.  So he gave the headphones to Alliot and he didn’t hear Bubbles walk off.

After  that Bubbles came across an owl in a tree and Bubbles said, “Hello, Mr. Owl. What’s wrong?”  “I am afraid of heights, but I don’t know how tall my tree is.”, said Mr. Owl. Then Bubbles reached in his knapsack and got a tape measurer. “What are you going to do with that?”, asked Mr. Owl. “I am going to measure your tree for you.”, said Bubbles. Bubbles flew up and measured the tree for Mr. Owl. “Your tree is 4,000 feet talk!”, screamed Bubbles. “Thank you! Thank you!”, said Mr. Owl. Just then three fancy owls came and said, “Mr. Owl, you win the Tallest Tree Award.  Thank you, Bubbles!”

The next day they flew to Deerland and ran into two deer. The deer was weeping about their antlers being dirty. Then Bubbles said, “I know what you can use to clean your antlers.”  The deer said, “What?” “You can you soap. All you have to do is squirt the soap on your antlers and scrub it.”, explained Bubbles. Then the antlers became very white. The deer were happy and told Bubbles thank you. Bubbles almost forgot about Elmer until he ran into ta tree full of boogleberries! He took some and he flew all the way home to help Elmer.

We are in our fourth week of our artist unit! We have finished our novel, written biographies, reflections, and now we are starting to create our artwork and write our scripts. We still have about one week left, but we decided to give you a sneak peek! Come see us COME TO LIFE on Monday, May 2nd at 1:00! It’s a come and go affair!

 CLICK HERE to watch!

Students demonstrated their knowledge of the science terms: transparent, translucent, and opaque by creating a replica of O’Keefee’s flowers by using different materials. They wrote reflections that explained these terms that were found in their artwork. Georgia O’Keefee is one of the artist that our grade is studying during our four week artist unit.

We are on a two week unit about space while reading our class novel My Teacher is an Alien! We’ve learned about the International Space Station and how our solar system works and all of its parts that makes it so special. On Friday, we read a descriptive short story about aliens with our partner. After highlighting the description in the passages,  we created art that was based from the passage. This week we are continuing our study about space!

Students learned a dance to help them demonstrate our science terms! After discussing that friction can help or hinder dancing, the students danced barefoot so they wouldn’t slide, but their pants could help them spin. The students showed momentum and inertia by running around their partner and having their partner stop them from moving. They have learned that velocity is the speed and a change in direction.  While dancing, the student ran towards the front of the room, and then split off to do a leap! There are a lot of examples of force, acceleration, momentum, inertia, friction, and velocity. Can you spot it in our video? These fourth graders can explain it!  CLICK on the link to watch! Forces and Motion Dance

Students wrote a poem in centers this week with a partner and created a piece of art to represent the poem. We looked at some of Alison Strine’s artwork and wanted to replicate her style using our poems as the theme. Students first glued newspaper to a piece of cardboard, chose their background color, and then painted over the newspaper. Next, students cut different pictures out of magazines to create an image that represented what their poem was about. They made a collage using the magazine cuts and glued it on the center of the cardboard. Finally, students picked an important line or phrase from their poem, typed the words, and then glued them on their cardboard. It was a fun project and we were very pleased with the final product!

While studying about conservation and reading our class novel Just Grace Goes Green, the students built “Something out of Nothing” with reusable materials. Our something that we made was a robot! But of course we didn’t just build a robot, we challenged them by making them find equivalent fractions in order to collect their robot parts! We gave them a fraction for their body, arms, legs, nose, and eyes, and they were to use their knowledge of multiplying or dividing to find four other equivalent fractions from their Time to Show What You Know handout for their parts. This was also a race! The groups that accurately completed the challenge were able to be more selective with their choosing of parts of reusable materials!

We went to the southern hemisphere during our annual Cultural Arts Festival. Australia to be exact! You can read a previous post and look at some of our photos! It was such an amazing day!  At one of our stops while we were there, we went to the Sydney Opera House and listened to a lady sing beautiful opera. At the end of her show, she lead us in song. You can click on the link below and watch and listen to us sing along in the LAND DOWN UNDER!

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The students began learning about the relationship between mixed numbers and improper fractions. These numbers have the same value, look the same in a picture format, but have different purposes when using fractions in everyday life. The students made up three mixed numbers that had a denominator of four and used their math skills to change the mixed number to an improper fraction.  After looking at Piet Mondrian’s work, we created art like his by using  the three primary colors and bold lines to create our fraction art. We used a wax resist technique that caged our primary watercolors in blocks of fourths. Can you see the correlation of the mixed number and the improper fraction? We can! Look at the yellow area of the art below. Can you name the mixed number? Can you rename it as an improper fraction?

                              Mixed number: 2  1/4    and    Improper fraction: 10/4

We have started division! The students worked in their center groups to solve division word problems while looking at art prints.  They used the manipulatives that coordinated with each of the prints to solve the problems, answer basic questions, create number lines and used the repeated subtraction method.