Sir Isaac Newton was an amazing man who had many PYP qualities. We decided he was an inquirer, caring, knowledgeable, a thinker, a risk taker and very open minded. He has taught us that anyone can achieve great things if they keep trying and are interested.

            We have been having a great time learning about Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion.  Some of the experiments we have done to test his theories include; launching carts with marbles, dropping objects of different mass, comparing the distance carts of different masses travel and lots more (see photos.) After much discussion, hypothesizing and testing, we all agree that his laws are right and that we use them in our daily lives.

Our first weeks included a lot of cooperation

We slid into our first unit on a slip-n-slide. First we tried to see how far we’d go on a dry slide. Then we brainstormed and thought if we added water, we’d slide farther. Bingo! Then we thought about it some more and figured a soapy surface would make us slide even farther! Watch the video to see if our hypothesis was right.

Welcome to our first blog.  What a fun first few weeks it has been.  We all were quite nervous on our first few days, especially the new kids but we started playing different games as soon as went into our new classroom.  The games showed us how much we have in common with each other and were also fun.  It was different being in 4th grade because we felt bigger and more grown-up. We have classrooms on the top floor and that is pretty cool.

When Monday came around we started work. One of the different things we have done so far is the slip and slide experiment and car racing; this is for our current unit on Forces.  Did you know that Isaac Newton had 3 laws of motion? Those laws have a lot to do with our unit even though he lived about 500 years ago in England?

Our Math work has consisted games, individual and group work and we have been learning place value up to the millions, factors, prime numbers and rounding.  Our work on multiplication is becoming harder than in third grade and we have learned some new strategies for adding and subtracting.

In our reading and writing we have been doing note taking and we are beginning to plan our writing, like this piece here. The specials have been fun especially art where we made portraits in a mixed up funny way. 

Things are awesome so far in 4th grade; here are some of the words that we brainstormed about our experience so far.

Questions, scared, smelled fresh, thinkers, James and the Giant Peach, ECA, excellent teachers, play, snack, open-minded, happy, unit, uniform, read aloud, caring, curious, moved rooms, white board, funny teacher, colorful, risk-taker, numbers, cold, dice, money, games, refreshing, library, PE, profile words, biography, cool, pleased to be back, many books, excited, super-duper, children’s voices, reading, creative, IT, great.           

Well that’s it for now; see you next time for another installment of our blog.  Please check out all the cool things that are linked to our blog site.  You can see videos, photos, as well as links to the math and spelling web sites we use in school, and if you want you can make comments.  If you like ask me to help you.