4K Newsletter for Oct. 3, 2008

Fabulous French
By Elise and Paul

These days in French with Madam Jacque we have been learning about Sea Animals. We are learning how to say swim, walk, float, and many other things that have to do with different sea animals and how they live in French. Along with that we picked a sea animal and wrote a short paragraph about the animal that we choose. Some of the things we wrote about were what color they are, what physical adaptations they have, their size, and if they are aggressive or not.

In French we are learning about eye color and hair color. We would start by asking what hair and eye color different classmates have. We also got sticks with hair color words written in French. We sat in a circle and would start with the first person in the circle. They read what is on their stick roux, bruns, noir, or blond. Then the second person would read the first persons stick then his or her own stick. But when you come to the last person, he or she has to name all of the sticks without looking.

Mardi Gras is a French holiday celebrated in The New Orleans 47 days before Easter. They celebrate Mardi Gras by having parades with big floats and flashing lights. Everyone wears costumes with masks. It is against the law to take your mask off during the celebration if youre on a float. Everyone on the float throws beaded necklaces to people on the ground. Some people will even spend $8,000.00 on green, yellow, and purple necklaces. Green, yellow and purple are the colors of the holiday like red and green are the colors on Christmas. Most people eat pancakes called crepes. Crepes are thinner than pancakes and deep-fried. People put toppings on their crepes like jelly or whipped cream.

That is what we are learning in French!

Have you ever heard of a noodle house? Here is how we do it! First, sketch a house on a piece of cardboard. After showing it to the teacher, glue spaghetti noodles on your pencil lines. Next, lightly paint over the cardboard with glue and put aluminum foil on top. Rub the foil with a steel wool pad to scratch the aluminum. After painting black ink on top, scratch it again and let it dry. You have made a noodle house!

Scratch art is fun! You need a sharp pointy stick to scratch a design on a special piece of paper that has colors beneath the black top. When you scratch, the colors come up and you have a cool colorful design. Mrs. Miller laminates our scratch art for us.

We have sketch books to use to do lots of work in art, like drawing, sketching, and writing. We use sketch books when we are done with the day’s assignment.

This is art in fourth grade – it is really, really fun!

In writing class we do lots of writing projects. One of our writing projects is a blog. In a blog we get a topic to write about. We are actually writing one now! We have to write details. If you were writing about Time for Kids, you could write about one issue.

We also get to write keypal letters. For our class you send them to Saint Andrews School and the keypal you have is in Fraserburgh, Scotland. You tell your keypals about yourself and other information too. Our teacher also lets us decorate the paper if we are finished.

We also do assignment stories. One of ours was the “Our Relatives Came” story. In it we wrote about what we did and what happened one time our relatives came. Another one we did was our vacation story. In that one we wrote about one time you went on vacation and added details.

Another thing we do is write book reviews. One book review was on our favorite book. A book review is not a book report! In a book review you tell someone about a book, but you cannot tell them the whole story because then they won’t want to read the book. That is what you are trying to get them to do by writing a book review – read the book.

Sometimes in our free time in writing class our teacher lets us make stories for fun, or you can publish them in the Imagination Station.

That is what we do for writing projects!

National Geographics WildCam AFRICA

Lots of desks for wonderful students
The nicest teacher ever
Workbooks packed with information
Homework pages waiting to be filled out
Page filled books
A desk for the teacher
Computers used for awesome projects
Reference books for our needs

Margie Palatini’s Web Page

Book reviews should be ready to add to the 4K blog by the end of the week. Stay tuned!