Wonderful Wednesday: Author Visit

 

When we walked into class on Wednesday, we corrected homework with our partners and began our morning work.

At around 9:00am Ms. P started math.  We learned how to use part whole bar models to solve two step word problems.  I thought the problems were somewhat challenging, but the bar models really helped me to decide what strategies to use.

After math we went to Music, and after Music we went to see Grace Lin, the author.   She was great.  She talked about how and why she became a writer.  I especially enjoyed her magic tricks and the role playing with some of the students.

When we left the author visit, Ms. P continued to show us how to edit and revise our fiction story.  She used one student’s story and showed us how to stretch out the most important parts.  We added dialogue and similes.  We also changed the wording to make the story easier for the reader to understand.

After lunch, we spent the rest of the morning revising and editing our fiction stories by ourselves and/or with our partners.  At the same time, Ms. P sat with individual students to edit and revise their Columbus posters.   We also learned a little bit about singular and plural nouns.

Finally, during science, we learned about the difference between living and nonliving things.  Ms. P gave us some pictures and we had to identify whether or not they were living or non-living.  At first, I thought this was going to be easy, but it was actually hard.  It was surprising to me that soil was not living.  There are many living things living inside the soil, but the actual soil itself is not living.

We ended the day looking up science vocabulary in our science notebooks.

Overall, a great day in 4th grade.  I am looking forward to learning more tomorrow.