Mystery Skype! Can you guess where I am?

Here are some clues....

1.  East of the Mississippi 

2.  Warm climate

3.  Spanish speaking 

4.  I had to take a tiny plane to get here

5.  Home to bioluminescent bay...tiny sea creatures that glow in the dark

6.  There are wild horses

7.  It is a US territory

8.  It is an island

9.  It is next to the Dominican Republic  on one side and ST. John on the other side

10. Can you figure it out?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dear Families,

Thank you so much for sharing your children with me everyday!  Together we have so much to be thankful for and we strive to be a community that supports one another to do our best!  Your children brighten my days, surprise me with their ability to learn new material, retain it and apply it in the classroom.  Your children care for one another and choose to be kind day in and day out!  

Thank you all for supporting the Endeavor Team's Craft Fair preparations.  It was wonderful to host so many of you last Friday for our work party!  We made so many beautiful rock pendants and the art work for our stationary sets is just beautiful!  We could not have accomplished all this without your generous donations of materials and most of all your timesand energy!  We can't wait for all your pies and thanks in advance to those who will be working the table on December 6! 

The Global Read Aloud wrapped up this week!  We loved the book The 14 th Goldfish!  I don't think the characters will leave our minds as we continue to read other books we will make connections to our old friends Melvin and Ellie!  On Monday we were part of large conversation with Jenni Holm the author!  The most important lesson she shared with us was that an author's work is never done, you are constantly revising and editing to make it better.  This lesson inspired us to work through our realistic fiction pieces, editing and revising them a long the way!  We even shared theseieces with other 4th graders on Friday!

We had an other mystery skype this week! This time we all had a map of North America.  We listed to the ten clues from the mystery classroom, within 7 clues we knew the class was in Ontario, Canada!  Our global connections are expanding and our knowledge of the North American Continent is growing, too!

We wrapped up our Geology Unit this week! We ran two experiments about erosion!  Ask your child about them!  We will be jumping into a unit about electricity with an engineering performance task!

We also wrapped up Unit 2 in Math!  All mathematicians came out meeting or approaching all the standards that were covered in the unit on Multiplication and Division!  Now we are on to fractions and decimals!  Please continue to work on Fact Fluency!  Your hard work is paying off as most of us continue to improve our scores!

Writing celebration with our 3rd Grade friends in Ms. Hertz's class!

Coloring the town with our book buddies!

We helped our Book Buddies create a map of shelburne by helping them draw and color important buildings and people!

Mystery Skyping with a class from Topsfield, Massachusets!

Here in this first set of pictures, you can see both classes at work!  We were making the call, answering and asking questions and becoming friends!

In this set of pictures, the mappers are taking out puzzle pieces and marking states with cubes!  These two strategies help us figure out which states they are not in, based on their answers to our questions!  We are noticing that the mappers are more efficient than the emappers because they don't have to drag, click and pin, they just take out the puzzle piece or cube it!

In this set of pictures, the emappers are marking the Mississippi River, Canada, and Mexico so we have landmarks to use when we pin the states that don't fit the clues we have uncovered from asking thoughtful questions about geography!  It is very hard work and sometimes we get pulled off track!  

Here the back talkers are chatting with the other class!  Back talkers have to be careful to not give clues about where we are!  Every time we use this the other class always gives us hints!  They don't mean to, but they do!

The Question Keepers have recently been using the computer to keep track of the questions asked by us or asked to us.  But on this day they kept a paper record and it worked out better.  They ended up working more closely with the runner and the logical reasoners!  It seems that sometimes we work more accurately and precisely without computers....hmmmmmm....except for the actual Skype connection and the back talkers.

Lastly, here you see the logical reasoners and runner having a meeting at the meeting place!  Together they decided the next question to be asked and transported it to the inquirers!  

Once again we have had a successful skype!  We figured it out with 6 questions!  The other teacher showered us with compliments!  We ended the call talking about the 14th Goldfish!  

Written by Photographer Kate and Vasanthi