Where Fiction Writers Get Their Ideas

The discussions this week in Writers Workshop was about where writers get their ideas for fiction stories.  Students collected their own story ideas from small moments in their own lives.  They also collect story ideas from books they wish existed in the world.

Annotating from an Informational Text

This week in Readers Workshop, the students focused on how annotating an informational text helps them as readers understand the text better.  Here are some examples of how students annotated from the informational text entitled, "At Home in the Arctic".

Discussions were had in class about the guidelines for appropriate annotations.  We then as a class came up with our guidelines for annotating an informational text.

First Week of School

Wow!  The first week of school is already over!  We have been very busy this week learning all the CHAMPS behavior expectations for the classroom, hallway, bathroom, cafeteria, playground, and auditorium.  CHAMPS expectations create clear guidelines for acceptable behaviors in common areas of the school.  Here is an example of CHAMPS for independent reading in the classroom.

This week we also created a mission statement (a class pledge) as a whole 4th grade family (Barton/Ledford family).  Students set their own goals for reading and writing. Then worked together as groups to come up with one goal they could agree on.  All of these goals were then put into the mission statement which will hang in the room all year as a reminder!

Students also got a chance to partner share with some of their writing this week.  They were working on an opinion piece about whether school lunch was healthier or lunch from home was healthier.  Students had a great debate about this issue!

Orientation

Orientation is Thursday, August 14th at 2:00pm. 
 I look forward to meeting each and everyone of my AMAZING 4th grade Otters!