Mr. Romard’s 4th grade Blog

It was a resounding success. Special thanks to the King (Alex) parents – Jeanette and Greg – for their generosity and time for the slideshow and upcoming video. Everyone loved making the play and having these memories will make them last forever. We were so glad to see so many parents and students come attend our show. We had six shows over two days covering 21 classes! That is 85% of the students in elementary!

Mr Macintyre has a ‘history’ with the Shanghai American School. Our class learned that his great grandparents came to China in 1900 as missionaries. His great grandfather on his mother’s side was even a principal. Further, his grandfather even attended SAS for middle school and was a boarder – meaning he slept at the school!

We couldn’t believe that they had to take a three week ship ride to come to China back then. The 1931 yearbook was a real treat to see as well. Thanks Mr. Mac for sharing your primary resources of the modern china period and in particular neat facts about our school.

Shanghai teachers and parents had a wonderful opportunity to hone their technology skills this weekend when Concordia International School hosted a technology conference. They hope to make it a annual thing and it has good potential with the dynamic pair of Michael Boll and David Larson in leading the way.

For the first session, I attended Mark Smith’s Photoshop for Intermediate users. Despite the trial download taking too long to download and setup, Mark demonstrated some useful tips with Photoshop (ie how to ‘brush’ up our photos for your resume and ‘about page’ on your blogs – such as whitening our teeth, adding some color to our eyes, adding some tan color – just overall cheap facelift stuff) and it was a treat to listen to Mark with his quick wit and selfless manner. He’s a great presenter for sure.

For the second session, I moved to the front of the class and became the presenter with Barbara Boyer – who is the amazing Elementary librarian at our school. The regular GarageBand presenter could not attend, so we offered to help out. We shared how we have been using GarageBand to make Book Trailers – in effect making book reports so much fun for the students. During the session, our audience shared a number of other great tools to use:
Photopeach
Scratch
Blabberize
Voicethread
Voice Candy
Keynote – importing sound and photos

For the third session, Melinda Alford led a share session with technology and I walked away with a few great sites and a nice surprise – Voicethread is back! One reason I use GarageBand for book trailers was because Voicethread has been blocked or incredibly slow for years in China where I work. Some of our gems included:
Using TedTalks for current events (NB – I subscribe free via iTunes)
http://search.creativecommons.org/  (I love this one – great links to
places to get images, video, music and other media for anything that you or your students create!)

http://www.lessonplanet.com/

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/

Finally, for the final session, I attended WordPress by Michael Boll – which was for beginners, but since I felt I would be teaching this to other adults in the near future, I wanted a refresher course. And good thing I did, I actually learned something I didn’t know – that I could fine-tune my Dashboard screen making it just the essentials I needed, how to create a poll (although this may not work for multi-user versions), and a reminder to get the plugin to have my blog post automatically update my Twitter account – automate it baby!

The conference was a resounding success. The Eurest lunch was fantastic and the 100 folks attending were very positive. Keep up the great work Michael and David – an excellent start to a great tradition.Technorati Tags: VoiceThread

Forget about the tortoise winning against the hare, it was the slow snail that was the hero today in 4MR science class. I was surprised myself how fun it was to watch them. As part of our FOSS Structures of Life science unit, we are caring for snails and observing them eat, sleep and interact together. We have two homes, one group will be feed carrots, the other spinach or lettuce. Some students already have good predictions for what will happen.

We did come up with some excellent questions, that even I don’t know the answers to – let’s see who can figure them out with some good effort.

1. What is the difference between a snail and a slug?
2. What are snails good for? What do snails do in nature?
3. What do we need to create a home for snails?
4. What are it’s two different size antannae used for?
5. Are there male and female snails? How do I tell?
6. How long do snails live?
7. What’s in the slime a snail leaves behind it? Why does it do that?

I always like to extend the students learning that is connected to what we are studying in class. During our experiment I mentioned that like a toad, the snail could have a built-in safety mechanism to stop animals from eating it (raw) – and go figure, three days ago, an Australian man is learning the hard way not to lick or eat a raw snail. I use the free Zemanta plugin to enhance my blog entries and provide related reading to my students. Some articles are more for adults who enjoy learning with their children, so I hope you have been enjoying the additional Zemanta articles when I have included them.

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• Man Fights For Life After Slug-Eating Stunt (news.sky.com)
• Snails and endangered gorillas: perfect together? (scientificamerican.com)
• Iron-plated snail (kottke.org)
• Mud snail invasion holds Olympia’s Capitol Lake (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

We had one of our best buddy sessions of the year!

Our kindergarten friends have started an Under the Sea project and each picked a sea creature to become an expert on. The fourth graders helped them in their research by asking their kindergarten friend five things that they wanted to learn, then a page was dedicated to the answer for each question. Fourth graders did the bulk of the searching and writing, while our little friends did the bulk of the drawing and thinking. It was great to see the great collaboration going on and the pride in the older students. I believe both did some learning. It was good review for my fourth graders and the young ones loved the fact someone older shared such a keen interest in their thinking!

We hope to finish our research later this week.

Image by Michele Massetani via Flickr

We began our study of poetry today and while reading the poem ‘Jack and Jill’ to my students, we realized that Jack may have left Jill on the hill!

Jack and Jill went up the hill

to fetch a pail of water

Jack fell down and broke his crown

And Jill came tumbling after.

Up got Jack,and home did trot

As fast as he could caper

He went to bed and bound his head

With vinegar and brown paper.

So — students are required to write the next four lines of the poem – to tell the story of Jill and to continue the rhyming pattern of the second and final/fourth line. Please post your four lines in the comments section. Parents are also invited to write if they have a clever finish.

Also – for homework, students are to draw a small picture of the final scene or stanza of Casey at the Bat. The full text and some background can be found here. For some inspirations, I found some sample Casey images from Google.

The students jumped on the poetry books when given the chance. Fellow teacher, Todd Denton, had done a great job collecting all the better poetry books from the library into a large tub. In seconds, the books were selected and it looked like this week’s assignment of locating five poems that show imagery, rhythm, or emotion will be easy to identify and then copy into their writing booklets.

This week’s worthy sites will work for the next ten days. Remember on May 20th we head to the Shanghai Expo.

Math

http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/frames_asid_128_g_2_t_3.html?open=instructions

http://www.funbrain.com/linejump/index.html – try SuperBrain Integer Level

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/mathsfile/shockwave/games/animal.html

http://www.coolmath4kids.com/polyhedra/index.html

Science – The Crayfish are coming, the crayfish are coming!

http://mackers.com/crayfish/

http://ezinearticles.com/?Pet-Crayfish—The-Best-Gift-to-Give-Your-Kids&id=4120885

http://aqualandpetsplus.com/Live%20Food,%20Crayfish%202.htm

http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

Social Studies

The 4MR students have been doing a great job on sharing current events with their slideshow presentations. Since, we covered the oil spill in Southern USA, here is some updated info for students to read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/us/13q-n-a.html

http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/audience_catalog.php?RECORD_KEY%28audience_chosen%29=audience_id&audience_id%28audience_chosen%29=2

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• Oil spill solutions uncertain, slick spreads west (scientificamerican.com)
• BP to try again to cap oil gushing into Gulf of Mexico (telegraph.co.uk)
• Obama Toughens Up As Oil Slick Solution Fails (news.sky.com)
• Must See Aerial Footage of BP Oil Spill Shows ‘The Gulf Bleeding’ (Video) (treehugger.com)
• Oil Spill Causes Thousands of Turtle Eggs Not to Hatch… Not in the Gulf of Mexico (treehugger.com)

We had a chance to share our learning of electricity with our school power expert – Mr Brad Knowles – who has saved the school hundreds of thousand of dollars with his power saving strategies. He’s a smart guy and yet his calm manner allowed everyone to relax despite the ‘humm’ in the room. He told us some interesting facts about electricity:

• 86.2% of all electricity generated in China comes from coal
• We would need to fill our gigantic high school gym with coal ore three times for each second of electricity use in China
• The great Three Gorges Dam only supplies 3% of the electricity use in China
• Our school pulls in 10,000 KiloVolts of electricity, which must be changed to 400 volts – using induced copper wires – our students understood this point as we used induced electricity on batteries & nails to have nails pick up paperclips (this is what causes that eerie humming sound)
• Everyone was impressed with the huge chillers, boilers and generators in the school’s power plant.
• Students, like Kent & Kevin, who always dreamed of being engineers had an especially fun time in Mr. Knowles’ electrical playground

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• A Lag in China’s Nuclear and Hydro Power (green.blogs.nytimes.com)
• The Coal Truth: Will the Coming Generation of Electric Cars Just Be Coal-Burners, Once Removed? (scientificamerican.com)
• China faces up to summer energy crunch (businessgreen.com)
• China Overtakes Germany In Wind Power (usnews.com)
• China Ignites Global Coal Market (online.wsj.com)

Before the May Day holidays, we had several local musicians and artists share their skills with all the students in elementary. The 4MR class learned that painting an egg isn’t as easy as pie, but sure was fun.

With the wonderful weather, we enjoyed a fun day outside with our reading buddies. After reading some books on the picnic tables and shade, we moved onto the playground. The 4MR students had a chance to enjoy some structures that aren’t present on their own intermediate playground.