Dr. Johnson's Reading Blog

Next week (Thursday, December 12) we will participate in a simulation of the immigration experience. In social studies, we are studying the Gilded Age as it transitioned to the Progressive Era. Studying immigration is an important part of this study so we usually take a few weeks to look at immigration and how it affected the development of the United States becoming a world power. The experience is supposed to simulate the emotions, feelings, and perspectives of the immigrants who sailed to the United States. Each student is playing the role of either an immigrant or an Ellis Island processor; characters were drawn randomly. Your child is expected to research that particular immigrant's background (characters are fictional) and nationality in order to better portray, and understand, that particular immigrant. Processors will be doing the same thing - getting to know their character and their background. This will influence how characters interact and how decisions are made. As y

I am having a difficult time keeping up with our blog. I am so sorry about that. As a I shared at Curriculum Night, students would be engaging in their first Expert Project of the year. Their expert project is on ecosystems. Each student is in charge of researching a particular ecosystem, uncovering all they can about that ecosystem, then identify various characteristics of that ecosystem such biotic and abiotic factors, identifying herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores, etc. We begun research yesterday and student expert projects will be due the week of November 11 - 14. There are three parts to the expert project: Written Portion - students are expected to type two pages, double-spaced, sharing their ecosystem Slideshow Presentation - students will put together a slideshow to present to their peers. This slideshow will provide visuals and diagrams (food chains and webs) of their ecosystem Verbal Portion - to go along with their slideshow, students must practice what they

I have posted the presentation we used for our Friday gathering. This will give you a glimpse into what we have been working on over the last couple of weeks. To say the least, we have been busy! This week, our class will be heading over to Summit Middle School to get a lesson on how to use microscopes. This is a part of our unit of study on cells. We will be using microscopes to study the various parts of animal and plant cells. Our citizen science projects are just beginning. In a nutshell, different groups of students are engaging in various citizen science projects. Some of these projects range from documenting wildlife around our school to monitoring precipitation to transcribing ancient documents. These types of projects allow students to be included in a much larger community of scientists knowing the information they collect and document will be used by various professionals all over the world. As many know, explorations is an important part of our day. During this

Welcome back to a new school year! It is so nice returning with the same group of students. We have been able to jump right in to school and classroom procedures, adjusting to new schedules, and getting used to our new roles as the "elders" of the school. Here a few pictures from our first day of school. By far the best part was meeting our lunch / reading buddies. After meeting our lunch buddies, we headed over to the cafeteria to each lunch with them. We will start reading with our buddies in a few weeks, after Mrs. Klosterman has had some time to help the kindergarteners adjust to school life. We are definitely looking forward to these times. Besides getting used to the classroom schedule and helping kids get back into thinking as readers, writers, and mathematicians, we have begun investigating citizen science projects all students will participate in. I have been a big proponent of citizen science because it allows students to participate in the collection of data th

Thank you to everyone who in some way helped out with our 4th grade field trip to Brattonsville (I will post a few pictures soon). I believe everyone, children and adults, had a wonderful time on this trip. Though a little rainy, I couldn't have asked for a more well-behaved and attentive group of students. The docents in Brattonsville were awesome storytellers so you couldn't help being engulfed in their presentations. When Adam the slave was sharing his story, it took everything in me to hold back my tears. Truly, a wonderful experience.  All this week will be PASS Testing. Please remember to make sure your child gets enough sleep and eats a good breakfast to keep their energy going. Tuesday will be the reading portions of PASS, math on Wednesday, science on Thursday, and social studies on Friday. Because of PASS Testing, I am also limiting the amount of homework going out. They will be bringing home their Everyday Math journal to work on some review in preparation of thei

I didn't realize it had been so long since I posted. To say the least, our classroom has been humming along. We have been at our busiest yet with collecting data for climate change, our colonial simulation, and our student led conferences. Now that our colonial simulation has finished, we will add getting ready for gathering on February 22nd to that list. Here are some updates as to what is going on in class: Please remember that Student Led Conferences are this Friday, February 15 . If you were not able to sign up for a time, I will contact you later in the week to set up an alternative time. If need a reminder as to what your time is, please send me an email.  In reading, we continue studying non-fiction and non-fiction text features such as diagrams, charts, maps, headings and sub-headings, boldface, etc. Students had not realized just how important these features were in non-fiction reading. As we dive head first into lots of non-fiction reading, students are immersed

So this week we have been working diligently on our Colonial simulation. Students have been placed into groups and have completed their first assignment. Each assignment will eventually help students in the decisions they will make during the simulation. During these assignments, student learn the reasons why people left Europe to colonize, what life was like on the ships and in the colonies, and what geographical locations for best for colonizing. These assignments are important because they help determine what are called "wealth points." These wealth points are translated to money that each colony will use to supply their ships for their trip to the New World. I will try to post pictures this week. We also worked for the first time with our reading buddies from Mrs. Klosterman's class. I can't tell you enough how proud I am of these kids. They took their job of working alongside less experienced readers very serious. They understood they were there to model good r

I put together a Scholastic Book Clubs book order for January and will be sending out order forms on Monday. To place an order, you can click on the Scholastic Book banner to the right. That should automatically take you to the Scholastic website. Order will be due on Wednesday, January 23 . Our class activation code is GPY4P . Thanks!

Here is another photo from the 4th grade music performance.

I forgot to post these photos of you children from their music performance.

Hi everyone! I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas break. My family just got back from visiting relatives in California about a week ago and I still feel like I haven't got over the time change. It also doesn't help I caught some kind of bug the last day of my trip. I do want to remind everyone to take a look at Center Connections. On February 15th , we are having all day S tudent-Led Conferences . These student-led conferences are put together by your children as they articulate what they have learned this year so far and their goals for learning for the remainder of the school year. We will begin working on preparing for these conferences in the next few weeks. At that time, I will send out sign up sheets for times. In math, we have begun working on decimals. The concept of decimals has been tricky as students try to connect their new understanding of decimals to their prior knowledge of fraction. Students are beginning to learn that .3 is the same thing as 3/10 t