Mindset Monday

What a great way to start the week! Our morning message stated that you become what you think... our question asked for another way to say that something is too hard. They had a lot of great ways to look at a challenge positively! After special, we watched the school news put on by the 6th graders and headed off to our academic block.

In my room, the 4th grade students wrote descriptions based off the book, Motel of the Mysteries, about an object and then brought in the artifact but we needed to guess what it was first. I was extremely impressed with their writing! We had a lot of fun guessing too! Then, we reviewed primary vs. secondary sources. Next, we read a primary source on Newsela: a letter from a housewife to Thomas Edison. Finally, we wrote letters (primary sources) to ourselves about what is going on in their lives right now. I'll be mailing these out to them the last week of school. We also caught up with Aven, Connor and Zion. After reading today, we had a great conversation about how you can connect to others in many different ways including experiences and other things that happen throughout our lives. I challenged them to look for others that might need help making connections.

In math, we played, Buzz, a game where we counted by multiples. We struggled a bit at first but will keep practicing to get more fluent with our multiplication facts. Next, we worked with multiplicative comparisons. It's not always about the answer but also understanding what is being asked as well as the process. Next, we applied this thinking to real world shopping problems and wrote equations to model our thinking. Finally, we took some time to observe some patterns with numbers.

In meeting today, we shared about our weekend. We also discussed our social media board in our room. It's a pinterest/snapchat/instagram/photos board where I am encouraging students to bring in pictures and things to share with others about themselves from outside of school in order to help them make connections and share their interests with the class.

After lunch, recess and quiet time, we used Byrdseed TV again to learn about complexity. Today, we focused on multiple perspectives by looking at the different roles we have: student, son/daughter, soccer player, dancer, artist, etc. Then, we took 3 of the depth icons and used them to explain our different perspectives. Again, this is all in preparation for being able to go deep and complex with everything we do this year. If learn it all now, we don't have to spend time explaining what to do and can get right to learning.