Category Archives: 4th Grade Classroom

What’s Happening in Science this week – 10/20 – 10/23

This week we have began our Animal Adaptation unit. This unit is being led by my fabulous student teacher, Mrs. Sartin. We will have our next notebook check on Monday of next week (10/26.) This will cover notebook pages 52 – 57. We will be testing on Wednesday, November 4th.

Tuesday – Today we viewed an Animal Adaptations PowerPoint and completed a booklet. This booklet is our daily week grade for the week. This is notebook page 52.


Wednesday – Today we read 3 passages about giraffes, elephants, and geckos. We identified the structural adaptations that helped it to survive. This is page 53. We also completed Day 1 – Day 3 of adaptations warm-up. This was on page 54 of our notebook.



Thursday – We will review the warm-ups and finish NB 53 Read It. We will be reading and describing the structural adaptations of agave plants and earthworms.

Friday – Today we are completing our Tech It page on NB 55.

** These resources were purchased from the Science Penguins teachers pay teachers store. The link is here.

Tall Cup Structure – 10/16/15

Today students were able to participate in the Tall Cup challenge if they were finished with their Life Cycle section of their notebook. I was super impressed at their group work!! Students were given 40 cups, and they were told to build a tower. The tallest tower would win. Here are our groups and structures from the challenge!!


  
  
  

The picture below this was the tallest tower of the entire day!! It measured in at 92 cm!!!
  
  

What’s Happening this week — 10/12 to 10/16

This week we are learning about life cycles. We will not be testing on this — we will be taking a notebook grade for this standard.

Monday – Today we are learning about invertebrates and vertebrates. We will be putting this sheet on notebook 46.

We will create this page on NB 47 about vertebrates. This is a page in progress.

Tuesday – Today we glued in this page on NB 48. It is our information page about life cycles, and we will be revisiting it throughout the week.

NB 49 – We created the following foldable about incomplete metamorphosis. We were learning about the life cycle of a grasshopper.


Here are a couple of great examples from my 2nd period.



Wednesday – Today we are learning about the life cycle of the praying mantis. We will be creating NB page 50.

Thursday – Today we are learning about complete metamorphosis. We will be learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. We will create NB 51.

Friday – Students that are finished will get to participate in a STEM challenge. Students that are not finished will finish. Notebooks are to be turned in by the end of class. This will be a test grade.

These notebook pages are available for purchase in the Science Penguin Teachers Pay Teachers store. The link is here.

Perfect Attendance Party #2 10/9/15

I’m SO proud of my homeroom kiddos!! We earned our 2nd Perfect Attendance party on Wednesday, and we celebrated on Friday.

Each day that the ENTIRE class is present, we add a letter to the board. We are spelling the words Perfect Attendance. Out of 40 days of school, my kiddos have had perfect attendance 34 days! That is amazing!!

Why is perfect attendance celebrated? When students are absent, they lose so much content that is impossible to catch up on fully. I understand that sometimes things do come up or we are sick – but I also know that sometimes we just wake up and don’t want to come that day. I’m trying to encourage my kiddos to come — and so far it seems to be working well!!

For this party, I chose to do a fall theme. We had bottled water and graveyard pudding cups. It consisted of chocolate pudding, marshmallow with a gummy eye, a candy corn pumpkin, and a gummy worm. We also danced to a few gonoodle videos. And of course — I snapped pictures and had to record video!! I can’t wait to see what we do for our 3rd party!!

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What’s Happening in Science this week – 9/14 – 18

We are continuing to work on our Plant Unit. We will be testing September 29.

Monday – Today we read 3 passages about plants. These passages are our theme about plants – importance of plants, needs of plants, and how plants reproduce. We picked out the key details in each and wrote them on a graphic organizer. These can be found on our interactive notebook pages 18 – 21.

Tuesday – Today we watched two study jams – Plants with Seeds and Photosynthesis. We described and illustrated what we knew/learned about this in our notebook. This can be found on notebook pages 22. We also illustrated a page about the needs of plants.


  
Wednesday – Today the kids really impressed me!! I had really debated having them do today’s activity, and they all aced it!! I’m going to step up my game — these kids can handle it!!! We matched photo cards with their description, and recorded it on their notebook page 24.


Thursday – Today we analyzed a picture of a houseplant, and recorded our thoughts on our graphic organizer. We started a notebook page Plants we eat — and we will finish it on Monday.

** We will stay in homerooms tomorrow due to Homecoming Festivities.

Random Updates — Lunchroom and Perfect Attendance Achievement

It’s been a great week at HES!! We have lots of exciting things happening so I wanted to do a blog post. This will be pretty random.

First of all, next week is Homecoming Week for Haleyville City Schools. This is one of my favorite weeks of the school year. We have lots of fun with our themes. I am posting right below this the picture of our themes. HES is different than HMS and HHS due to our picture day — those with older siblings may get a little confused. Also, my homeroom kiddos are to wear 70’s clothing on Thursday for dress from another decade day. I will explain why later on in the post — it’s a good one!! I will be snapping pictures of the kiddos dressed throughout the week — and I will add them to the blog and our 4th grade Instagram page — which is @hes4thgrade.

  
Next up .. our lunchroom!! I have been SUPER impressed with our lunchroom this year. Our students are getting a choice for the first time EVER!! Students can choose to eat at the hot bar, pizza bar, or a grab-and-go lunch each day. The grab and go lunch is available as supplies last — it looks great! I had one parent stop me at Wal-Mart to say that the lunchroom choices this year has been the best thing to ever happen to them at school! Her child is such a picky eater (her words), but he has been super happy having a choice in our lunchroom this year. I found the cutest idea on a teacher facebook page I follow. I adapted it to fit into our classroom and voila! The kids LOVE putting their popsicle sticks in the correct bucket each day — brought lunch, hot bar, or pizza bar. This also brought about the start of classroom jobs. The kids would beg to let them put the popsicle sticks back in the name bucket — so I made a classroom jobs list so everyone could help out in the afternoon!

  

Not only do we love lunch choice this year — but we also love our fruit and veggie program. The kids are supplied a free fruit or veggie 3 days a week — and they are SO excited each time they see the containers! It is SO nice for our kids to try new healthy foods. This week we had green bell peppers, grapes, and bananas. The kids LOVED them all! I posted the cutest video on Instagram of a few volunteers trying out the bell peppers. Is this not the cutest thing ever?!

https://instagram.com/p/7bRNC1MZi4/?taken-by=kgoggans2
Continuing on with my random updates, I had to sign a 20 day attendance report one day last week at school. Every 20 days we have to check attendance and sign it to update in the computer. My sheet was surprisingly blank of check-ins, tardies, or absences. I know it is the beginning of the year, but when you have 18 kids in a homeroom – it happens! Why was my page so blank? I have a couple of reasons that I believe my students are being so present this year. The number one reason is my bestie Draco. Our new classroom critter is a great motivation to come to school to see his pretty face each day. The one day I didn’t bring him with me because I had a doctor appointment right after school was super sad EVEN FOR ME. I’m so used to looking over and seeing him in his terrarium … and it was empty. Not seeing his little eyes watching the kiddos and me was just sad. How did I teach for 12 years without him? I have no clue. I will be doing a post very soon on my thoughts about having a class pet. 

  
 The other reason I think my kiddos are coming to school so well this year is also because of a cool idea I saw on Pinterest during the summer. Each day that my homeroom are all present, we add a letter to our board. We are spelling the words perfect attendance. To increase the competition, we invited several classrooms to join in and compete against us to see who would win first. When we spell the words perfect attendance, we celebrate and also begin again. I thought we would probably do a popcorn party to begin with — but my homeroom had a different idea. A disco party was what these kids wanted to do. I’m not sure why they wanted this — but how cool are they to want something so out of the box?! I love their personalities!! So … on Thursday of this coming week we will celebrate with a disco party! Even though we made our goal on Wednesday, we are prolonging our celebration because of Homecoming. Thursday’s theme is to dress from another decade — which is perfect for us! We will dress like the 70’s, I have borrowed a disco ball, and I’m planning a disco party during snack time!! I’m sure it will be groovy!! And of course … I will snap pictures for us to have forever!! 🙂

I will be blogging very soon about my classes beginning Class Dojo (LOVE!!),  and my many feelings on having a class pet. I’m going to get some quotes from my kiddos to include!!

Love,

Mrs. Goggans

Red, White, and Blue Day — 9/11/15

Friday was so hectic that I may have let a couple of classes slip by me without snapping a picture. The kids are pretty good though at reminding me!!

To show respect and honor to the anniversary of Sept. 11 we wore red, white, and blue to school.


  
Next week is Homecoming so I’ll be posting pictures daily of our kiddos dressed up!! 🙂