Explore In Grade Four With Mrs. Pols

Thank you so much for coming out to conferences! It was wonderful to celebrate your children’s hard work, growth, and learning with you. We truly appreciate the time you took to connect with us and share in the excitement of their accomplishments. Your support makes such a difference! This week, our class wrapped up our math work on representing larger numbers in a variety of ways. The students practiced using standard form, expanded form, word form, place-value models, and number lines. They showed great confidence  in demonstrating their understanding. Next week, we will begin our work on decimals . Students will explore tenths and hundredths and learn how decimals connect to fractions and real-life situations. It should be an exciting new challenge!

This week, we continued with our work in Social Studies with how focus, How Canada became a country. We learned about the Seven Years’ War and how it helped shape the early story of Canada. We explored the causes of the war, the key events, and the important outcomes, such as how New France was taken over by Britain. As the students developed their understanding, they collaborated with one another and organized information into groups. This helped the students to better understand how these events in the war affected the people living in North America at the time and helped shape the country we know today. Next week, we will extend this understanding by exploring different perspectives from the past. Using loose parts, the students will work in groups to build models that represented the wants, concerns, and viewpoints of French settlers, British officials, Indigenous Nations, and British merchants. Learning Outcome: I can demonstrate an understanding of how Canada became a country by...

Our Grade 4 students have begun an exciting new research project! Last week, we modeled the full process together as a class—reading a nonfiction text about wolves, taking clear point-form notes, and planning and writing a well-organized paragraph. Students are now moving into independent practice, applying these skills to research an animal of their choice. As they read, students are working toward the outcomes: “discuss a variety of facts expressed in nonfiction text and explain how animals use their senses to respond to their environments.”   You’ll see them exploring how different animals use sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing to survive and meet their needs. Students will be proud to share their work with you during conferences at the end of the month. You’ll be able to see their note-taking, planning, and writing progress firsthand. We’re excited to see the creativity and curiosity coming through in their research!

Over the past weeks, the students have been very engaged in The Case of the Greedy Gnome! This exciting math mystery has the students practicing their addition and subtraction skills and applying their knowledge of graphing to solve the mystery of which gnome stole food from the supply room. First, the students identified key information in the graphs and questions, highlighting necessary information. Then, they interpreted different types of graphs with differing scales, including bar graphs, line plots, pictographs and pie charts. After doing this, they answered the questions and eliminated suspects to identify the guilty gnome. We are very excited to solve our final clue next week to finally reveal the identity of the greedy gnome!  Learning Outcomes: I can interpret data represented in pictographs, bar graphs, dot plots, and more. I can understand the use of scale to share data in different graphs.