Tales Of A 4-5 Something

On Wednesday, March 26th the 4th and 5th graders of Julia and Tim's homestations visited the Portland Museum of Ar t. (Yazi and Nancy's class will gfo later).  We saw things like wooden statues of animals, paintings, and mosaics. On the top floor there were lots of wooden sculptures. They were amazing. On the third floor there were lots of paintings and glass artifacts. We did not manage to get a good look at them as we just passed through briefly. On the second floor we saw a gigantic canoe. There were also some interesting paintings and photos. There were lots of models and statues scattered around the museum as well. On the first floor we saw a gift shop and a screen with a video of waves crashing. We went into the Unum Gallery where there was a lot of art made by local artists. Some of us got to sketch what looked like a fish tail coming out of water. Some of us all did a blind contour drawing based on a painting called Jessica.  We spent around 2 hours there it was an am...

In Tim’s homestation we are working on poetry. We are writing apology poems based on William Carlos Williams' poem This Is Just To Say , odes to simple everyday objects based on Pablo Neruda's poems like Ode To My Socks .  Recently we started writing different types of poetic forms such as tritinas and personification poems. In my personal opinion, tritinas were the hardest and the most fun for me was probably the personification poems. I enjoyed it because I loved creating my character of schadenfreude. I think that the tritina was hard because you had to come up with a topic and then three words that you think of when you imagine that topic. You create three lines and the word you thought of goes last when you’re done with the first stanza you move onto the second but instead of a 123 format your last word goes first then the first word and then the second and the last line will go 231 and then the third stanza is 321. It’s pretty complicated but, who knows, maybe you’ll li...

RQ stands for Research Quest. We used to call them IPs for Independent Projects. In school, we got to pick something we want to learn more about but it can't be something we already know a lot about. It could be animals, countries, plants, people, basically anything. You get to go into the library and look at some books about the topic you want to research. Once you find at least 3 topics you want to research, you rate your topics from your favorite to least favorite. For instance, Suzy’s first pick was Spider Monkey’s and she got it and Iris’s top pick was The Sea Dragon and she got it! Normally, you get your first or second pick. After you know what you got for RQ you read the book. Then you would move on to note taking and you record information on either the notecard or the Google document that you have in your Drive account. After you have written all your note cards or your document notes, you organize them in a way that you think looks good. Really, we want to tell a story w...

There are three months and four weeks left in the school year and 4-5 is still buzzing with excitement. One of our newest projects is a Literature (LIT) project in which we are reading books in verse independently or in a group of 1-5. We get to choose! After we finish our books, we do something called a One Pager. One Pagers are like a poster with information about the book for fellow classmates to read and to learn about books they can pick up. The One Pagers must include the following things: Your name, title, the author's name, some of the poetic form(s) seen in the book, a rating (out of 5 stars), a summary (and some of us try writing it as a haiku, rhyming couplets or another poetic form we are learning about in writing), and at least one powerful or meaningful quote in the book. Right now Esther is working on a One Pager on the book “The Magical Imperfect”. 10/10 recommended. You should read it. William is reading Moo by Sharon Creech and is almost done. In our homestation...

Written by Ava (A) and Katherine (K) A: Hi I’m Ava and  K: I’m Katherine!  A and K: AND WELCOME TO OUR BLOG POST!!!!!!!!  K: Today we will be talking about the blog on our blog! We write blog posts so parents, grandparents, great grandparents, pets, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, godparents, friends, great great grandparents, and bacteria can enjoy or question our work in 4-5.  A: Nahum and Owen started the blog thirteen years ago, in 2011, because they wanted to share their delectable work. We have something called classroom jobs which helps us learn responsibility and things. K: Our teacher Tim is cool 😎.  A: Yes Katherine, Tim is very cool. Now let’s get back to talking about the classroom things. So every week we rotate through different jobs like Table Tamer, Assistant, Host, and Recycling Recon. One of the job is Blogger and this week we got paired together.  K: Which was a bad good idea. 👍 We are currently working on poetry in 4-5. I can write...

In chorus, we just finished our old songs so we are starting a new round of songs. We have voted on the hit song from Zootopia, Try Everything or Count On Me by Bruno Mars. Which one would you vote for?  Our final vote settled us on Count On Me by Bruno Mars. Other songs were decided like Manx Lullaby and The Rivers Are Running Again . Hope to see you again at the spring concert 2025! Max and Baxter

Every year 4-5 has 2 concerts that you have to participate in and we have done 1 of the 2 concerts so far. We sing four songs in each concert. Our songs for the 1st concert were: We Know The Way from the movie Moana, Seadea, Ferry Me Across The Water, Who Can Sail. Some people get special jobs like playing drums. Bea played the drums for us this year. Some of us had an extra concert because we sing in WIC, the intergenerational chorus. Hopefully, we will see you at our next concert! William and Landon