Growing Our Brains…
We
are continuing to learn about what it means to have a growth mindset vs a fixed
mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that you can’t change how “smart”
you are. For example, a person with a
fixed mindset might say “I am bad at math.” They believe that they will always be this
way. However, we learned that we can
actually “grow” our brains by learning new things. We also learned that people aren’t BORN
smart. You can grow your brain through
practice and ability to stick with a task. So,
people with a growth mindset believe that even though math might be a difficult
subject they can be successful with additional effort and practice. It might take them longer to understand the
topic, but with determination they can achieve their goal.
Earlier
in the week, the class watched a video about a creative pig who was trying to get
a cookie jar on top of a refrigerator.
Throughout the course of the video it is very clear that the pig was
having a very difficult time reaching his goal of getting the cookies, but
through the use of a variety of strategies and determination he was able to
reach his goal (almost!).
Here
is the link to the video so you can watch it.
It is a wonderful way to show what it means to have a growth
mindset. We then talked about how we
could learn from what the pig did when we are in school or in any part of our
life.
Writing Workshop
It
was fun to see all of the Writer’s Notebooks come in by the end of the
week. The kids seemed to put a lot of
thought into the pictures and memories that they glued onto their covers. They will be using their Writer’s Notebook
throughout the school year, and it will be a great place to go back to and
revisit when a student has a hard time coming up with a topic to write about that
is meaningful to them.
This week we will continue to build on
their knowledge of writing small moment stories. They have come to fourth grade knowing a lot
about what makes a great small moment.
We have focused on stories that are about people and/or places that are
important to the students. The kids are
working on choosing stories that might have happened over a short period of
time rather than a "morning to night" story.
To help the students get ready to
write about these small moments we practiced storytelling the ideas to a
partner. The more practice the kids are
able to have talking out their story, the easier it will make the actual writing
of the story.
Fish in a Tree
We started our class read aloud last
week called Fish in a Tree by
Lynda Mullaly Hunt. It is a great book
to go along with our discussions and learning about having a growth
mindset. We have had many discussions
about the cover of this book.
The kids are intrigued by the cover as well as the title. Be sure to ask your child about their “theory”
about the cover. They have started to
build ideas based on their own background knowledge as well as some of the
words in the text (evidence).
This week will be starting to work on
a display in our hallway to go along with the book’s theme of taking on
challenges and working through those challenges no matter how difficult they
are. (We hope you will be able to take a
look at the display during Open House on Wednesday!)
Open House
I am
looking forward to meeting you at Open House this week. I had mentioned in my email last week that
Open House will start at 6:30. There
will be 2 sessions. The first session
will run from 6:30-7:15 and the second session goes from 7:15-8:00. I will present the same information both
times to allow parents to visit the classrooms of siblings.
I hope everyone has a great
week! Hope to see you on Wednesday!
~Jen
So great! Thanks for the update!
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