Tok School's Fantastic 4th Graders

 Weekly Greetings, To start with, I want to remind you of a couple of important events this week. The first is the Spring Concert on this Tuesday, May 1. There will be two showings and some students will have certain roles in the afternoon or evening musical. Your child should know what roles they have, and in which time slot. The afternoon concert will be at 2pm and the evening show will start at 6pm. In addition, we will be doing a mock trial of The Three Little Bears verses Gold E. Locks on Thursday at 1pm at the Tok Court House. For both events, the students have been working really hard on their roles. I hope you all can make it to see how well they preform. In between trying to complete some units of studies last week, there was a Chess tournament on Wednesday with two fourth graders in the competition. They were in and out of the classroom as they advanced throughout the day.  On Thursday, we enjoyed viewing the stars in the mobile planetarium and presentation f...

Weekly Greetings! The end of the school year is rapidly drawing to an end! We continue to press on, and will maximize the last few weeks to the fullest! A big event this week will be the UAF Planetarium visit on Thursday. The students will have a presentation during the day, but there will also be a Family Night in the gym from 6 to 8pm. Additionally, I currently have some field trips planned starting next week, so I am just going to send a packet of permission slips out at once to make sure everything is in place well in advance. As for last week, we made some planting pots and later planted seeds to discuss Earth Day. Furthermore, the students did a packet on ways to recycle and reuse containers on Friday.           After using the STEAM room on Thursday to make the plant containers, the students continued to create and explore other resources in the room. As a rock cycle review in Science on Thursday, the students were able t...

Weekly Greetings! I am pleased to say that all the district and state testing is completed for the year! Now, we can get back to a more normal routine for the remainder of the school year. Despite a four-day week, with two mornings committed to the PEAKS testing, the class was still able to experience some enriching activities last week. Starting with Tuesday afternoon, it was our monthly art activity with Ms. Shauna Lee. The students were able to begin a wind chime clay project. It was a great way to relax after our first morning of testing. The afternoon after our second day of testing, the students made a traditional Athabascan choker in our Alaska Studies class thanks to Helena Nelson. Some of the students wore their choker daily the rest of the week. Helena even pointed me to a youtube video of a Tannacross elder, Kenny Thomas, sharing a traditional story of how the Loon got its choker from a blind man. He went back and forth using his tradi...

 Weekly Greetings! This week will be starting off with parent meetings, and when the students return on Tuesday they will have another morning of PEAKS testing. Wednesday will be the same, so not only is our week short but it also leaves limited morning time for our regular reading routine. For that reason, I will not be sending home spelling words with homework this week. The PEAKS tests will be long, and take a lot of the student's concentration to complete. So, please remember that your child will need to be well rested and on time those two days. In the afternoon on Tuesday, the class will have there monthly art time with Ms. Shauna Lee, and on Thursday afternoon they will attend a special US Forestry presentation. Every Thursday, the class is signed up to use the STEAM room and they are looking forward to that time. They had a great time last week exploring cubelets with sensors, and creating structures with legos.   Later on Thursday, there was a bas...