I love the poetry unit! Over the past few years, it's grown to become my favorite ELA unit of the school year. It wasn't like I was super into poetry or anything when I was a student in school, but as a teacher, I've come to enjoy the creativity it elicits from the kids. Last year was the first year we truly integrated writing poetry into the unit, since it is technically designed with a primarily reading focus (with the exception of writing about poetry). And the poems that kids were able to produce last year blew my mind. The nice thing about writing poetry is that the genre lacks rules. All of the capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure guidelines we are tethered to when writing in prose are, in a way, thrown out the window. Not only that, but it allows students to write about literally anything, from feelings to interests to their own personal experiences. Reading poetry also has so many benefits. Of course, the descriptive and abstract nature of poetry gets kids really thinking and making sense of what they read. Making inferences is an imperative skill, and poems require a ton of inferential thinking in that you often have to dig deep to find the meaning packed behind each line of a poem. ANYWAYS, yup, I love our poetry unit, and I'm pumped that its gotten underway.

Our Bucket Filler this week was Ava. One of the things I really appreciate about Ava is that I can tell when she "soaks in" what is being taught in class, because she immediately applies it to her work. For example, it was cool to watch her use what we focused on in some of our writing mini-lessons to add to and improve on her personal narrative. Not only that, but her spelling is substantially improving this school year, which Ms. Fudge, Ms. Jareo, and I are super pumped about!

   

On Wednesday of this week, we had our winter concert. As fourth graders this year, students are given the opportunity to play an instrument, which makes school concerts slightly different from those of previous years. Students who play an instrument are on stage during the grade level performance, as well as the band or orchestra portion of the concert, depending on the instrument that they play. That means there are many logistical directions that need to be followed for the concert to run smoothly, and the concert itself is longer. Not only can it be nerve-wracking to get up on stage in front of a cafeteria packed with people, but students need to be quietly seated, attentive audience members for over an hour. That's no easy feat! But I was really impressed with all of our fourth graders for their attentiveness, patience, and of course musical talents. The kids should be proud of themselves, and Mrs. Ward did an admirable job putting together such an awesome, organized concert.

This week was our reteach week for our nonfiction unit. We focused our daily ELA blocks on analyzing text-based questions and forming concise central ideas, before getting an opportunity for test revisions on Friday. Most students finished revising their tests based on individualized written feedback, class discussions, and any new understandings from the week. These revisions are taken into account when I regrade them, and at some point this week, I'll be sending the graded tests home for parents/guardians to go over, sign, and return.

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Dylan and Colin. I can't say enough good things about both boys. Both of them are considerate students to me and considerate classmates to their peers. They are both thoughtful and reflective, and when either of them is absent, the classroom feels noticeably incomplete. I love that I get to spend lunchtime with each of them this week! 

 

    

 

This week in ELA we took our unit test for nonfiction, which is taken by every fourth grader in our school district. The test doesn't signal the end of our unit; but rather it allows us to identify the specific areas of the unit that need to be retaught or focused on. I'll be honest, this is not an easy test. There is a lot of writing involved, including a text-based writing, and we haven't had too much practice with developing strong responses to text-based questions. Yet despite the rigor of this assessment, not one student gave up or stopped trying, which is incredibly commendable. After going over the questions and noticeable trends as a class, we reflected on the test and unit. With this input and the test results, a few trouble areas stood out, specifically around truly understanding a text-based question in order to form a clear central idea in response. So that's going to be a major concentration over the next week!


In writing, we focused our time over the last two weeks on the revising and editing stages of the writing process. We had lessons around adding purposeful dialogue into our narratives and splitting our writing into paragraphs. Students also typed up their narratives and worked on a neat interactive social studies assignment using Google Slides and Google Maps.

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Annabel C. and Miqueias. Annabel is on a Bucket Filler streak-- this is her second week in a row! She really filled my bucket after school on Monday when I noticed she'd left me a note in my classroom mailbox. It was a simple sentence or two, but its thoughtful, supportive message meant a lot to me. Miqueias put forth so much effort on his nonfiction test, and Ms. Fudge and I were both impressed and proud. His hard work paid off and he did great, and I love seeing him continually blossom as a student this year.

We came back from winter break for three days...and what an interesting three days it was. We'll start with my lack of voice. There were moments on both Wednesday and Thursday when I literally didn't have a voice. I'd try to speak and nothing would come out. I sounded a lot worse than I felt though, and I'm glad I didn't call out for a sub. The kids were also wonderfully attentive and kind, to the point that this may have been one of our best behaved weeks of the school year! (Maybe I'm onto something...maybe losing your voice is the latest and greatest in classroom management...) Fortunately in terms of my throat, things were a bit better on Friday. It definitely wasn't a typical day though. When it was announced that our school was going into a secure and hold lockdown, I was in the middle of my prep time. My homeroom was in gym and Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom was in the cafeteria for concert rehearsal. I felt pretty helpless that I wasn't with my fourth graders, but I can say with confidence that they handled the understandably nerve-racking situation with maturity. As we discussed during our whole-class conversation after the lockdown was over, the events that unfolded were taken as a precaution and we are incredibly safe at the Kennedy School.

We had FOUR Bucket Fillers this week, two from each class. This was the result of the great week we had, in addition to the fact that we didn't pick Bucket Fillers for the week prior to vacation. For Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom, Kailynn and Annabel C. took the weekly title. I was so impressed with Kailynn's ability to bounce back after being a bit shaken up on Friday. Our ELA block was of course shortened that day, but she was able to fill out her entire graphic organizer, participate, and overall just have a really awesome class. For Annabel, it was her participation this week that especially stood out. We're tackling some tough stuff in our nonfiction unit as we've begun writing text-based responses, and Annabel has shown me a lot of effort in how often she is willing to put herself out there and raise her hand. Miles and Brennan won Bucket Filler in my homeroom. Similar to Annabel, I was proud of how much Miles participated this past week. It's fun to see his face when he has an "Aha!" moment, making it evident that he's actively listening to and making sense of the lesson's content. Since the beginning of the year, Brennan has also grown a lot in how much he participates. Furthermore, he did a really nice job with his homework this week, and I'm hoping that effort continues. Keep up the good work, everyone!