Ms. Melissa Cournoyer is our fourth grade teacher. Throughout the school year, the students learn what is needed to be a responsible citizens and Disciples of Christ. They learn the importance of individual work as well as how to be a good team member through group assignments.
This year in English/Language Arts we read various short stories, poetry, and two literature books. In the fall, we read The Sign of the Beaver which allowed students to explore and appreciate Native American cultures. The students were able to take what they learned from the story, and apply to our field trip to Plimoth Plantation. The 4th grade students use their paragraph writing skills to write informative, descriptive, persuasive, compare and contrast essays as well as short stories and creative and eye-catching newspaper articles. They learn the importance of good paragraph structure, proper mechanics and spelling, and word choice.
In math, we take the basic foundations of division and multiplication and apply those to longer and more challenging problems. In addition to learning pre-algebra concepts such as orders of operations and renaming units, students learn how to apply mathematical skills to everyday problems.
For religion, students learn not only what it means to be good Christians of faith, but they learn about each of the 10 Commandments in depth, and how it applies to their lives. They also studied the parts of the mass, and the importance of some well-known Bible stories.
Science is taught with both a text and experimental problem solving approach. Students learn about physical , earth and some life science as well as the human body. Students learn about electricity through the construction of multiple kinds of circuits. To understand how weather forms, students learn how to track hurricanes using latitude and longitude. In addition, they were able to create their interactive hurricanes!
Social Studies is mostly about the four main regions of the United States. For every region, we have jumped into the United States with giant maps in with we color the regions, located and draws the rivers, and label the states. Students also complete a Civil War research project where they researched the important facts, picked an importance person, made a timeline, and displayed their information in a creative manner.
