For the past few weeks we have been learning about the election process while reading a realistic fiction book entitled President of the Whole Fifth Grade. We held our own mock elections including nominations, primaries, campaign rallies, and speech debates before finally electing our fourth grade class president.. The six candidates did a phenomenal job, and the fourth grade teachers could not be any prouder of them. We are happy to announce that Jaylen will be our fourth grade class president for the 2014-2015 school year. Thank you to all of the candidates for your hard work and great attitude throughout the entire process, and congratulations to Jaylen!

The students learned about acting using movement and emotions through a video clip from the movie, Karate Kid. The students also learned about acting versus tableaux, a frozen picture, from a shadow theater group from Hungary. The students connected this knowledge of theater to the text structure of problem and solution that they had been studying in reading. The students had to act out a problem using movement and emotions. The students then portrayed the solution for the problem using a tableaux. This was a really fun way for students to connect a variety of learning together in one presentation. Make sure you ask your child about it and see some pics below!

Our Laurel High School football team will be playing for the 5A state title on Saturday at Mississippi State University. We had a district pep rally to show our love and wish them the best as they play against Oxford High!

During the annual Cultural Arts Festival, the students were emerged in a wealth of knowledge of the culture of Spain. During the day, we traveled to meet famous artists, taste delicious food, and even were introduced to the language. We even learned about the famous Run of the Bulls. On some of our others stops, we learned a Spanish dance, enjoyed a Spanish readers theater, and even ended the day with some famous games played in Spain.

Students learned about the artist Piet Mondrian. Students represented three mixed numbers in the style of Mondrian. The fractions were divided into fourths. The students saw that while creating their mixed number they were also creating improper fractions – it was just all in how you look at it. Can you tell the real Mondrian from our mixed number Mondrians?

Our students have been working with a partner to research a famous children’s author! They have read their author’s book, wrote a biography, created a book bag to retell the story, and created a PowerPoint to teach the class all that they have learned!

To complete our unit on Native Americans, the fourth grade spent a couple of hours touring the Lauren Rogers Museum. Every year the museum host a program honoring the Choctaw tribe that currently resides in Mississippi. The museum offered a tour of the Native American basket collection ranging from tribes all across the country.  The students were able to experience basket weaving, artistically designing their own basket,  jewelry making, the native language, as well as native dance ceremonies.  The day concluded with a sack lunch in the park.

While studying the skeletal system, we replaced the words of the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” with each of the correct terms for the bones of the skeleton. For example, the students sang “Cranium, Scapula, Patella, Phalanges” and “Clavicle, Humerus, Ulna, Radius” to practice learning where their bones are on their body. The students pointed to the bones each time they sang the song. This is a fun way for the students to practice at home as well. Our test will be this Friday!

During a Native American Unit, we read Rough Faced Girl and The Legend of the Blue Bonnet. After the reading of the two stories the teachers modeled how to make an open faced portrait using the character in Rough Faced Girl.  We taught the art concepts of proportion, realistic components and overlapping to create depth. After the modeling of the open faced portraits, the students created the face of the portrait based on the main character from the story The Legend of the Blue Bonnet.   On the inside of the open faced portrait, the students did a character analysis of the main character using either descriptive language or a visual representation of the character.  On the bottom half the students wrote a paragraph comparing the main character to themselves and a time when they experienced the same feelings as the main character.

We read The Popcorn Book since we have been learning about Native Americans. We learned many interesting facts about popcorn including that Native Americans brought popcorn to the first Thanksgiving meal. After reading the book, we estimated the number of kernels for three popular brands of popcorn. We used that number as our dividend and then put our division skills to work to solve how many kernels of popcorn each member of the class should get. Students were encouraged to use both the traditional algorithm and the Lucky 7 strategy to solve these problems. As a class, we created a frequency table and vertical bar graph for our favorite brand. We discussed that the chart and graph that we made could have been included in an appendix of a The Popcorn Book.