Mrs. Riegel's Fourth Grade

I hope you all had a great weekend. Happy New Year to those who celebrate Rosh Hashanah!

We had a couple visitors in our classroom this week, which is always very exciting. George Steele showed us all about how the Native Americans used different parts of the deer in their everyday life. The students loved seeing all the different deer parts, and Mr. Steele even played a tune for us on a flute-like instrument that came from the bone of a deer.

In Social Studies we started learning about the different features of New York State, including review of the states that border New York. We are working on completing a blank map of New York and we might even get a chance to test out our knowledge on a GIANT New York State map this week.

In writing workshop we continue drafting our realistic fiction stories using the chromebooks. Our focus last week was on showing what is happening in the story through actions. We also thought more about the heart of the story and worked on revising and developing our writing using different strategies we've learned.

In reading workshop we spent most of last week thinking about how we can read intensely to grow ideas as readers. We know that we need to read books that are within reach to help us grow as readers. In groups we came up with ideas for systems and procedures we can use to find books that we not only can read, but that we also want to read. The students came up with some really good ideas for how to get more books in our classroom and how we can recommend books to each other.

Last weeks math test results were fabulous! We started topic 2 on Friday, which is all about patterns - completing patterns in numbers and shapes, generating patterns in numbers and shapes, and completing skip counting series.

Our second special visitor was Mrs. Jones, the new Technology Integration Specialist in Bethlehem! Her roll in collaborating with teachers to support the use of technology in classrooms will be very beneficial to us this year with the new Chromebooks! She helped set us up on Google Classroom via speaker phone on Thursday, and then on Friday she came in and taught us a few tips and tricks for Google Classroom.