Farewell 4th Grade: Final Highlights

Our final quarter of 4th grade Idea Lab has come to an end, and I am so sad to say Good-Bye to our 4th Grade Spoede Turtles. We were able to end our time together with a fun unit, archaeology! Let's take a look at some of the highlights.

After learning about what archaeology is and the nine cultural universals, students formed small groups that examined the cultural universals for some ancient cultures. They presented their learning to the class.

Then, students participated in a mini-dig where 3 different cultures were discovered!

Egyptian, Ancient Chinese, and Aztec artifacts were pulled out of the dig and discovered!

Students also learned about the ancient written language of Egyptian hieroglyphics and how scientists and archaeologists are able to decipher and decode these with careful analysis and collaboration.

Students participated in a debate involving both 4th grade groups.  The debate topic:  Should the Elgin Marbles remain at the British Museum or should they be returned to Greece?  The students were very engaged in both the preparation and the actual debate.  

The students judged themselves on organization/clarity, use of arguments, examples/facts, use of rebuttal, and presentation style.  

You can see by the smiles on their faces that each team was very proud of their efforts!  They were very poised, prepared, and convincing.  

We ended our class in one large fourth grade group outside where we were able to meet with the foreman of our new school architectural project and ask questions.  The questions were thought-provoking and the answers were interesting.  I encourage the students to return on Community Night when we invite the public back to view the finished school.  I think they will be surprised at how different Spoede will look.  

We hope our 4th graders have an amazing time during their future school years.  This 4th grade group was bright, funny, social, and precocious!   They will be dearly missed!  From "Life Lessons of a Turtle" by Claire Tricket

Follow your instinct.

Swim with the current.

Travel at your own pace.

Enjoy time alone.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Don't give up hope.

Keep a hard shell.

Come up for air.

 

First Grade: Oceans

First graders experienced a fun unit about the world's oceans!  We began with a geography lesson and learned about the different ocean layers.  

First graders experience realistic fiction writing in their classrooms, but not fiction/fantasy writing.  We incorporated fiction/fantasy writing into our oceans unit by having students brainstorm and write a mythical sea creature story involving one of the world's oceans.  Students also compared and contrasted their mythical sea creature with an actual living sea creature.  

Here is a highlight of each student's mythical sea creature story.  

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The students learned about how plastic ends up in our oceans and came up with ways that we can prevent this from happening.  

Students learned that robots like rovers are created to explore areas that humans have difficulty getting to on their own.  These robot rovers can collect information about these hard to get to places.  Students programmed the robot rovers to move using a similar programming tool to Scratch Jr (which they learned about during our P.E.T.S. convergent thinking).  


Next year we will have an awesome programming and Lego unit with a theme.  Stay tuned to hear about our next year's adventures!  It was a great first year for us in Idea Lab!  Have a great summer!