Learning in Room 4A -- Pumpkins, persuasion and scientific writing this week. Oct. 22-25, 2018

Thank you so much to all of the families that attended our parent teacher conferences on Thursday and Friday, last week.    The conversations we had  will support the learning and growth mindset of all of our curious learners in grade four.  Your support is very much appreciated.

Ms. Hargreaves and Ms. Willis

Here are some photos of our investigations from last week.  Writing a persuasive paragraph was a major focus as well as returning to realistic representations we worked on sketching pumpkins and completing our first scientific entry for our decomposition experiment. 

Student's learned how to use a new blending tool called a tortillon

A tortillon (The French name for /tɔːrˈtiːjɒn/; or blending stump) is a cylindrical drawing tool, tapered at the end and usually made of rolled paper, used by artists to smudge or blend marks made with charcoal, Conté crayon, pencil or other drawing utensils.

One of the most important strategies that a writer uses, is a hook.  In other words, they pull their reader into the writing by making it interesting because it causes the reader to visualize and think.
This week we worked on writing powerful hooks for our persuasive paragraphs.  In our class example, we began with questions, then went to a simile and then a connection.  You can see how this type of writing causes the reader to visualize, and make inferences.

For your reference, here is the rubric that we will use to assess our persuasive writing this year.