Beauclerc's Night at Pizza Palace

    Isaac - awesome job convincing Mom to bring you to Pizza Palace.

 So nice to see these beautiful Collins ladies at Pizza Palace.  Thank you for supporting Beauclerc!

   #5 and # 37 having fun at Pizza Palace (and #15 at the next table).  We missed you, Patrick!

I knew Erik and his family would be at our Beauclerc Family Night.  

They have spectacular school spirit!!!

Fourth Graders Bury DEAD Words

Today in Writers' Workshop we discussed a strategy to add concrete language to our stories.  We decided to "bury" the boring, overused words and replace them with more descriptive synonyms.  Here is our Dead Word Cemetery.  R.I.P. dead words!

Meet Mumpkin

This is the Donnelly Jenkins Class entry for the pumpkin decorating contest.  His name is Mumpkin (mummy + pumpkin).

Boootiful Classroom Library

Our First Try at a Jigsaw

This week we revisited some of our routines and procedures in 4th grade, because we have many new students in our class. I choose 6 important routines that we all needed to review, and we used a strategy called a Jigsaw.  Students received their assignments in their home groups.  Next they met with an "expert" group to discuss and list all the steps, materials and CHAMPS necessary for the routine to work well.  The experts made a chart about their topic.  Today students returned to their home group to "teach" their classmates how to follow the classroom procedures.  The students did a terrific job working cooperatively and teaching their classmates.  I can't wait to try the Jigsaw strategy again!

Beauclerc Celebrates READING

Congratulations to the fourth graders who were invited to our reading celebration today.  Those students met or exceeded their 7-book goal for the first nine weeks!  Keep up the great work.

Super Sweet Similes

Fourth graders have been practicing how to write figurative language with similes.  Each "Hershey Kiss" was hand-made by the authors and includes a super, stretched-out simile (a comparison of two unlike things using the words like or as).

Using Our Reading Strategies

After reading Finding the Titanic by Robert Ballard, students made folded-paper books that listed the main idea of each chapter.  Check out this terrific cover illustration!

There's Witches in the Air