Dr. Johnson's Reading Blog

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...

As we wind down towards the end of 2012 and the beginning of Christmas break, I wanted to send some pieces of information your way. Passing of the Cans is this Friday, December 14. We have done a great job of bringing in items for Passing of the Cans. So far, this group has brought in more items than any other class I have been a part of. On Monday or Tuesday, we will begin taking a count of how many items we have before we begin looking at nutritional labels, servings, and so on. On Wednesday and Thursday we are participating in two virtual field trips. Wednesday's virtual field trip is about the Mars rover. That is all the information I have at the moment since I'm waiting to hear back with more details. Thursday's virtual field trip is our monthly field trip involving Colonial Williamsburg. This VFT is called "Colonial Idol" and focuses on the music and dance of the colonial period. This includes the song and dance of Native Americans, the wealthy, slave...

Hi Everyone- I wanted to send out a few pieces of information out your way: Please don't forget that we are collecting non-perishable items for Passing of the Cans. Passing of the Cans is only a few weeks away (Friday, December 14). We will use the items we collect to do some work in math involving servings and calories. This Tuesday at 9 pm, the History Channel is showing "Mankind: The Story of All of Us." I have been watching this series, and as a history nut, this series has been great. On Tuesday, they will be talking about the explorers, especially Christopher Columbus. While I wouldn't recommend watching all of it (the show ends at 11 pm), I think this show will be extremely informative. Don't forget this Tuesday is an early dismissal. This week we will continue studying the explorers by looking at explorers such as Magellan and John Cabot. In math, we will continue studying multiplication. We have been working on single and two-digit multip...