Vacation

Can you name this fish?

Social Studies

Kids took a virtual tour through Ellis Island; listening to audio memories and watching video clips to learn about immigration experiences.

Literacy Guest

Sue from VRI came to teach the teachers! Mrs. Anderson practiced her skills with a reading assignment and I got a chance to teach the kids a new way to summarize! The summaries came out awesome! I was really impressed by the level of complex text the kids read and then wrote about. Way to go!

Heritage/Immigration Projects

The finished Heritage projects look fabulous. The kids did a great job learning about their families and researching a country from their heritage.

Small Step Farm Field Trip

 Permission slips went home today! Please return them by Friday! If you cannot find your child's permission slip I've attached a copy of the original below.

Dear 4^th Grade Families,                                                                                               April 16, 2013

The field trip will be to Small Step Farm in Waitsfield, Vermont on Friday, May 10^th. Williamstown Elementary School is continuing to develop a small garden that will eventually provide (some) vegetables to our school lunch program. To kick start this project we are taking the 4^th graders to a small vegetable farm. While there, students will be transplanting seedlings, planting potatoes, inoculating shitake mushrooms and taking a farm tour to learn about compost and irrigation! The goal is for the students to observe the components of farming and the process of growing from seed to harvest. The bus will leave the school at 8:30 and will be returning at 2:15. Students will be coming home with a planted sunflower seed and we’ll be taking flats of seedlings back to school to plant in the raised beds! Pack a snack, lunch, water and clothes you don’t mind getting a little dirty. Dress for the weather and get ready to dig in the dirt!

            My child, _________________________ will have:

• Lunch from home
• Bag lunch from school- ham sandwich
• Bag lunch from school- PB&J sandwich

I, _________________________:

• Am able to chaperone the field trip to Small Step Farm
• Am not able to chaperone the field trip to Small Step Farm       

Please return this form by Friday, April 19th. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to call or e-mail us!

amormile.wes@onsu.org                 janderson.wes@onsu.org          (802) 433-6653

Thank you,

Amanda Mormile                                                                                        Jess Anderson

Spelling- week of April 15-19

These are this weeks spelling words.

Immigration Stories

We're taking them when they come! We've officially adopted the outdoor classroom space and used the sunny afternoon to do our social studies reading on the grass. Students did a great job staying focused during partner reading and choosing successful learning spots.

Tomatoes galore!

Tis the season for transplanting tomato seedlings into larger peat pots.

Fitness Bar Graphs

We worked on our fitness and graphed the results while reviewing components of a bar graph.

The girls

You all sang beautifully!

The boys

A snap shot of the room 11 boys. Way to go! Y'all sounded great.

Outdoor classroom!

We took advantage of a sunny day last week and peer reviewed historical fiction papers outside in the sunshine.

Divisibility, Rules!

Ask your student to teach you about the divisibility rules for 2, 10 and 5!

Race to Read

Troy Kingsbury came roaring into WES again this week! Every student in the school was able to check out The Green Lantern and grab their new Race to Read form. The excitement was contagious and the race cars are already starting to make their way around the classroom walls!

Celebration of Learning

Today we invited family members and WES staff into our classroom to celebrate all the learning that has happened the past two weeks. The kids just finished reading historial fiction books in reading class with Mrs. Anderson and wrote amazing historical fiction stories. Students went through the writing process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and worked super hard on all three drafts of their writing. The end result is something that each one of them should be very proud of! Our celebration kicked off with food from around the world. We took a museum walk through the Heritage Posters and learned a lot about where our classmates came from. So many of us have immigrant pasts, it was fun to connect with family and learn more about our heritage!