Grade 4 Is A Big Fan of Renewable Energy

Exploring Renewable Energy: G4’s Journey

While the above title statement sums up G4’s final opinion of renewable energy, we first need to go back to how they came to this conclusion. G4 started our fourth UOI unit, How The World Works, upon return from December break and students dedicated themselves to learning more about what energy is, the forms of energy, how energy is transformed, and renewable energy. They broke down the Central Idea: Energy comes in many  forms and can be stored and transformed for many purposes, into their own words and participated in numerous vocabulary activities related to these terms. G4 then conducted online research using BrainPop and YouTube videos, links to experiments, and other online resources and documented their findings in their “Energy Book” which was part of their Energy Learning Journal google slide. To demonstrate their understanding, students recorded FlipGrid and ScreenCastify videos, constructed interactive models, and completed 3-2-1 google docs explaining each of the forms of energy.  You may have seen snippets of this during our February assembly video. Our energy unit was integrated with literacy by reading numerous energy articles from GetEpic and ReadWorks with the focus on NonFiction Text Features as the literacy skill. Students also used energy concepts to strengthen their paragraph organization skills as well as writing a creative writing essay with the prompt: “What would the world be like without _________ energy”. For the final project, combining what they learned in Integrated Technology, students completed an Energy Transformation Graphic Organizer showing the various transformations that energy may go through to provide us with electricity. Overall, despite the challenges of online learning, I do believe that G4 was energized by this unit! 

See also: A Message from Administration Alley: The Summer Reading Challenge!

A New Learning Adventure: How We Express Ourselves – Media

Grade 4 now begins a new unit, How We Express Ourselves – Media, which is sure to be another exciting, relevant, and useful learning experience. Our new unit, while also providing an overview of media, will focus on how People Create and Manipulate Messages to Target Specific Audiences. Much of this unit will be spent analyzing numerous types of media including advertisements. This is a great opportunity for parents of businesses to share their company’s marketing tools and ads and we welcome any resources that you may be able to provide (guest speakers, flyers, brochures, online ads, commercials, etc…) The literacy skills integrated (integrated language) into this unit will focus on story elements, author’s purpose, reviews, and opinion writing to name a few. In any event, G4 looks forward to another exciting learning adventure! 

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