THE SCOOP ON-LINE

Welcome to fourth grade in Lecompton Elementary. Fourth graders had an exciting day, not the least of which included getting their very own lockers! We had a lot of housekeeping kinds of things to take care of, but they also got to play a “getting-to-know-you” game and several math games that I’ve made up over the years.

Mrs. Folk’s student teacher, Ms. Spare, invited her former fifth grade science teacher to present to our fourth graders on magnetism and electricity this Friday. As the person who inspired Ms. Spare’s love of science, Roger Duroni, gave a shocking presentation, as you can see in the pictures below. The children were absolutely spellbound during the entire hour and a half. I’m sure this will be a day they will remember for years to come.

Kids learned about magnets, magnetic fields, open and closed electrical circuits, parallel and circular circuits, electric motors and static electricity. I think they could probably rewire the whole school now!

I’ll post more pictures when I solve a technical problem.

It’s Pajama Day at LES! Several kids were absent, so it’s a small, but fun group.

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Yes, even in room 4B in tiny Lecompton, change is in the air. 4B kids will be exeriencing change beginning this week in two areas.

SPELLING: Since some students have shown that our spelling words are not challenging enough, we began spelling on Monday with a pre-test. Any words that students have already mastered can be eliminated from their weekly list. They will be replaced with more difficult words from the Challenge List. All children will still be responsible for 15 spelling words, but the words in each child’s list should be a better fit for that child. The test will still be on the last day of the week, but tests will be given to one another by peer spelling partners, while being closely monitored by the teacher.

A TO Z BOOKS: Starting later this week, when children finish assignments before others, they will have a long-term project waiting to guide their learning and their energies. Each child will have chosen a topic of their interest to research in their spare time. The topic might be animals, words that describe themselves, famous cities, etc. On each page they will pick a subject that begins with a letter of the alphabet. They will write a description of it and illustrate. They will also choose to use the Internet to either find antonyms and synonyms of the word, find how to say it in another language, or find the origins of the word. Or they could choose all three extras. In the end, books will be bound and kept in the class library to share with others for the rest of this school year.

Here are some research sites that kids might like to use:
enature.com for animal research
yahoo kids dictionary, encyclopedia, world fact book
your dictionary.com dictionary, thesaurus
translate find words in other languages
etymology find the history of words

Our recent math unit was a very short geometry unit on transformations, or moving shapes around in space. In order to help kids understand about turning, spinning and flipping objects, they got to perform those actions on each other. Who says math can’t be fun?

Both fourth grades loaded up their projects on a bus this morning and headed into the Douglas County Science Fair. Located at the Douglas County Fair Grounds – Building 21, the science fair has been introducing local school children to scientific method for 58 years. Lecompton children, with guidance from teachers and parents, develop their projects from an idea, to an experiment, to a display board. Many say its a really fun, educational experience.

Exibits will be open to the public on Thursday, February 5 from 3:00 to 9:00 PM, and on Friday from Noon to 10:00 PM. The awards assembly will be held at the fair from 7:00 – 9:00 PM on Friday night.

Please remember to pick up projects on Saturday from 9:00 AM to Noon. If you cannot come to pick up your exhibit during this time period, arrange to have someone pick it up. Unclaimed exhibits will be discarded.

Due to state budget cuts for education funding, this will be the last field trip that any class will take from our school district this year.

We had a wonderful presentation today about how kids can stay safe while exploring the Internet. The presenter, Kevein Honeycutt, had a really cute little dog with him who the children just loved. Mr. Honeycutt had some really good stories and advise for them. He even sang an original song about Internet safety while accompanying himself on electric guitar. You might like to visit his website for information on this very important topic.
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As a culminating activity at the end of this week’s reading selection, A Peddler’s Dream, fourth graders got to make comic strips of the story on the Internet. They used a simple but powerful tool called Make Beliefs Comix to demonstrate their understanding of plot and to retell the story. Both are very important reading skills that are tested on the State Reading Assessment.  Kids had a real ball with this assignment.

Several students have told me that they’ve used this site at home since I introduced them to it on Thursday. It’s a wonderful way to get kids to practice writing and to think of writing and story telling as fun activities. Of course that ends up improving all their communication skills as well.

Here is an article about some other comic building sites with links to the sites. They all have their pluses and minuses. I chose Make Beliefs Comix because it was simple and had a wide variety of characters and effects. The down side is that you can’t save it. You have to complete it in one sitting, then print. You might want your child to explore the other sites to see which ones they like the best.

On Thursdays and Fridays, 4B kids get to play a variety of educational games that I’ve found on the Internet that help them practice skills we’ve been working on during the week. This Thursday, they got to practice finding the mean, median and mode using Handling Data, a game from the BBC in England. It was really good practice and they enjoyed it the first few times through. However, there was not a big payoff as there is in games of higher quality. Still, maybe your fourth grader can show you what they’ve learned at home by showing you this game.

Statistics… Sounds like a really fun, exciting topic doesn’t it? Well, it is in our class. On Monday each fourth grader got their own small box of raisins. Kids wrote their estimates of how many raisins were in each box on a strip of paper that had been folded in half. Then they all hung their estimates on a piece of yarn ordered from least to greatest. Kids figured out what the minimum and maximum estimates were. By subtracting, they learned what the range of their data set was. Finally, they worked on the median, mode and (with the help of calculators) found the mean or average of the data.

Having worked up an appetite, they were pretty ready to eat their raisins, but first they had to count them and compare their new data to their estimates. They were mostly very close and reasonable. After finding the mean, median and mode of the new data set, they finally got to eat the evidence… except for the couple of kids who hate raisins.