Activities for the Week of February 7th-11th

Hello parents and students,

I hope everyone had a great weekend.  Here at Discovery School we had a busy weekend as we held the National Spelling Bee on Saturday morning.  The event was a big success, and all the spellers did a great job and showed off their spelling abilities.

Important Reminders

This is the last full week before our Science Fair on Feb. 17th.  Most students should have completed their experiments by now, and should now be putting all of their work into their final poster-board.  I can't wait to see all the hard work that the students have done with their experiments.

Classroom Activities This Week

Math:   We're getting into our second week in our Geometry unit.  The students will be learning about lines and angles, how to classify triangles and quadrilaterals, and about the basic geometry facts and terms regarding circles.  We will also be learning about the motion of 2-D shapes, such as sliding, rotating, and reflecting, and learning about the lines on symmetry in shapes.  It should be a fun week, as we have lots of hands-on math activities and working with shapes in the classroom.

Reading:  Our reading skill this week will be focusing on is: 'author's purpose', which teaches the students to think about why the author writes what he does.  This critical thinking about what we read is an important skill that will make our students stronger readers.  We will also continue to read our class-novel, 'The Million Dollar Shot' together and analyze the plot structure of the story, and have a short quiz that will assess the student's comprehension of the story, and their understanding of our previous week's reading skill of 'cause and effect relationships'.

Writing:  We will be wrapping up our poetry unit this week in writing lessons.  The student's will finish writing their rhyming poetry examples, and experiment with different rhyming patterns and subject matter.  The students will then work on putting together their very own book of poetry, with the edited copies of their favourite examples of their poetry.

Science:  This is the final week of our 'Motion and Design' unit in Science.  The students will have the choice of 3 distinct design challenges, and need to work together to meet them, record them, and then report on their findings to the class.  The challenge will be to build a vehicle that can travel quickly using the kinetic force of rubber bands, a vehicle that can securely carry a heavy weight, or a vehicle that can travel using the force from the wind.


Here's to a great week in grade 4!  On a side note, if you've read this blog could you please post a brief comment at the bottom of the blog or shoot me a quick email.  I'm trying to find out who in our grade 4 community checks up on us.    Thanks and all the best,  

Jordan Rose