Tok School's Fantastic 4th Graders

 Weekly Greetings! Our first quarter is officially over, and I will be contacting you soon about Parent/Teacher conference times for November 10. With the short week last week, in addition to basketball and my absence for medical appointments the week before, Halloween preparations sort of crept up on me. We will have a class party on Tuesday after the Halloween parade, and I will provide nachos and popcorn. If you would like to join us, or send a treat in with your student, it would be most welcomed. The party will start after the costume parade. On Tuesday, students can bring costumes as long as it does not distract them from the normal morning routine of reading and math assignments. During class, any masks or distracting accessories will have to be put away.  The Halloween parade will be from 2:00 to 2:15pm. It will start with the lower grades, and pass from grade to grade adding all the grades through fifth to march the halls. Last week raced by with only three days...

Weekly Greetings! Every week seems to go by faster than the last, and our first quarter is coming to a close. Other than trying to complete some classroom projects before I was out on Friday, a special event for the class mid-week was art with Shauna Lee. She does a wonderful job of direct instruction, and the class got an opportunity to showcase their artistic talent. Here are a few pictures from that afternoon, and I will be placing the finished paintings on a board in the hall this week. I hope you are all aware that we only have three days this week, due to two days of teacher in-servicing on Thursday and Friday. Also, on Wednesday we have an early release day and class will be dismissed at 1:45pm that day. I will only be sending homework home on Monday and Tuesday, and again there will not be any spelling words. Have a wonderful week! Kind Regards, Julie Brown

 Weekly Greetings! Last week started off with a visit from Sargent Bitz, from the Alaska State Troopers in Tok. The class has been working on a paper in writing about what career they might want to have in the future. Some of the students were interested in some line of law enforcement, or the military. I thought it would be nice for Sargent Bitz to share about why he went into the troopers, and what it really takes to be in law enforcement.  He did a great job, and the students had a lot of good questions. A couple of days later on Wednesday, the class participated in an instant challenge activity through AK Teach. The instant challenge was designed to practice the Engineer’s Design Cycle with a partner. After a short introduction, each group used the understanding of the center of gravity to construct a cantilever. The students worked in pairs to use only the materials provided to construct a cantilever. They were given 10 pieces of paper, 2 feet of masking tape, a gl...

Weekly Greetings! I hope you all got the letters home letting you know that the school day will be extended 10 minutes each day starting this week. Also, the picture retake day will be sometime this Tuesday. As for a few highlights from last week, the class went out to look for any plants still living after the fall frosts to use for a short experiment. We found some pansies by the greenhouse, and larger weeds in the grass on the hill near the playground. Some students hypothesized that the plants would dry up when put in a plastic bag, but others thought the plants would create moisture. That was exactly what happened after taping the bag to our class window. All living things need water, and plants are a part of a delicate ecosystem that helps with that. To review a Social Studies lesson on why the colonists felt the need for independence from the British, we did a simulation using M&Ms as money that was taxed by the king. When the king wanted more taxes, the student...