This post is a catch-up post from throughout the year - enjoy! We started the year by talking about different types of nouns - 4th graders did a great job remembering that nouns are people, places, things and were surprised to learn that IDEAS was the other category. It is pretty tricky so we didn't try to add many ideas to that category. Today we started elapsed time in math. Elapsed time is that subject that continues to trick students throughout the year. I wanted to make an anchor chart that helped students learn the trick to calculate time with the hours first, then the minutes! The t-chart method really seemed to help give a visual! This is a classic Pinterest-inspired activity I love doing at the beginning of the year. I post these giant posters around the room with various questions. Students are given time to walk around the room in a gallery walk (silent, writing answers on post-it notes) and then we talk about the general results. It's always a lot of fun and very informative of what students will let you know in this anonymous situation. We started learning about historical fiction and I used this anchor chart based on one I saw on Life in 4B and felt like it fit perfectly with what I needed! We used the mentor text, Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson to identify the real information in the story as well as the pieces that are imaginary (the fictional pieces). We then used Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt to identify the parts of a plot (title, setting [both time and place], main characters, problem and solution). Students then took that plot chart and wrote a summary of the story. This was the story that we did together as a class. The students then wrote their own summary of The Junkyard Wonders by Patricia Polacco