Mr. Fisher's Grade 4 Blog

  Today was our virtual Pillars of Care Assembly for Humility!  Congratulations to our December winners!    This week we also had two caroling assemblies (virtual).  Our class sang "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch." *In my previous post, you will see the link for our virtual winter concert. In Math at the end of this week, we continued working with symmetrical shapes.  We had a fun drawing challenge to complete the other side of a snowflake.  We also had fun with more Esti Mysteries--which use our logic, skip counting, and estimation skills. In Social Studies, we sorted the resource cards in groups again.  This time, we tried to sort into Renewable and Non-Renewable resource categories.  We had some great discussions about whether water is renewable or not (it is) and how we need to take care our natural resources and use them appropriately. Because of the cold temperature, we stayed in for recess and enjoyed body breaks, playing with blocks, and doing Math puzzles. I hope

Here you can find our class' virtual Winter Concert:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg_I-_iNLUw

In Math, we have been continuing our work on subtraction strategies.  We have been playing various Math games to practice our basic facts skills.  Today we have started a mini unit on Symmetry.  We explored drawing symmetrical figures and trying to find out how many lines of symmetry it had. In L.A. and Health we read "The Most Perfect Snowman" and connected it with our Pillar this month, Humility.  Students nominated their classmates for the 5 Pillars of Care Awards for December.  We will have our assembly on Friday.   In Social Studies, we are discussing natural resources.  Today, students grouped and sorted various resource cards based on their own chosen categories.   On Monday, we explored painting--with no brush!  We poured paint into plastic transparent ornament.  Students tried various techniques like dripping, mixing, swirling, and shaking.  It is fun to do Art with a 3D application.  They all look so great!

We finished our read aloud, "The Cats of Tanglewood Forest."  Lillian turned back into a girl!  The ending was a bit open-ended.  We discussed what we liked/disliked and still wondered about the book, and then wrote a response. In Math, we have continued work with subtraction of 3 digit numbers and doing Math talks for our strategies.  Students have really enjoyed "Esti Mysteries" where we see an image of items in a container and then get clues to figure out how many items there are.  It uses our logic and estimation skills. Later this week we started some ALGEBRA!  What?  Yes!  We discussed and used various strategies to solve questions with missing addends like 11 + ? = 92 In Science we have begun a unit called "Waste and our World."  We have started discussing waste, what it is, recycling, what we know about climate change.   In a neat Science/Art project, we made snow!  We used waxed paper to review what we know about translucent, opaque, and why thing

Wednesday Dec 15th - Pajama  Day to kick off caroling Thursday  Dec 16th - Plaid Day - Wear anything plaid to school to get in that lumber jack winter vibe.   Friday Dec 17th - Winter break themed - ugly winter break sweaters - dress festive for the start of the holidays! 

  Wow!  What amazing artists we have in room 11!  Each piece of artwork is unique and fantastic! Some of our pieces of writing are on the bulletin board too (our summaries of "The Last Polar Bear").   Well done grade 4's!

  This week we read a really interesting book called "The Last Polar Bear" by Jean Craighead George.  We wrote summaries of the book.  It is a beautifully illustrated story about a boy named Tigluk who comes face to face with a polar bear, Nanuq .  He paddles across the Arctic Ocean and finds Pilluk , the last polar bear.  During the story, we find out about how the Arctic is warming and changing.  This has brought us to asking questions and sharing what we know about climate change .  These wonderings bring us into our next Science unit, “Waste and our World." In Math this week we developed survey questions, surveyed our classmates, and made tally charts.  We found out about our classmates' favourite seasons, foods, video games, animals, and more!  Then we used the data to make bar graphs and analyzed the data. We have been playing Kahoot in Science to review what we have learned in our "Light and Shadows" unit.   In Phys Ed, we have begun a unit on basket

The start of our Art project! For our sky background, we used the “wet on wet technique” with water colour paints.   We painted the paper with water, then added water colour paint and watched the colour diffused and blend with other colours.   While our paintings were still wet, we sprinkled a coarse salt all over the page.   The next day, we scraped off the salt and were left with a neat effect that resembles snow!   Our polar bears were done by a guided drawing and using pencil first.   Then we traced over our lines with chalk pastel—which was new to most of us.   Using our fingers, we were able to smudge the chalk creating a 3D, shadowed look.