Book Orders are Due Wednesday, April 30!

This is the last book order of the year. It is a good time to plan for some summer reading. Here are some books that I know and like:
Lucky: #12, 13, 23, 43, 48, 51, 53, 58, and 75.
Arrow (April):  #3, 5, 16, 17, 21, 22, 37, 39, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 62, 71, and 76.  
Arrow (May):  #6, 9, 15, 23, 54, 57, 58, and 78.
*Please make one check out to Scholastic. Thanks, happy shopping!

Posted at 4:22 PM| Permalink

News from Na Pueo

Congratulations to our fourth graders for completing a very long week of testing! They worked really hard and deserve a restful weekend.

In class we have been working on finishing up our Ahupua`a/Kahala `o puna research. Here is the research checklist that the kids are following:

inquiry checklist kahalaopuna.pdf
We have also been trying very hard to finish our legends. We used this project to increase our understanding of story structure by breaking a story down into its main elements and then retelling our own version of the legend.  We also took this project one step further to learn about illustration and other important publishing skills. The students planned out each illustration by looking carefully at the part of the story they were going to illustrate. They listed all the elements that were present. For example, in Maui Goes Fishing: Maui, his fishhook, Maui’s three brothers, Maui’s canoe, and the ocean. Then they had to identify the most important elements, describe the feeling, and determine what the relationship was to the other elements. For example, Maui and his brothers are in the canoe, the canoe is small in a very rough ocean, and you can’t see the fishhook. From there, the students created their illustrations with watercolors. When their illustrations were finished, we got to learn and practice some very important publishing skills. The students used the digital camera to take close-up pictures of their paintings, imported them into iPhoto, cropped them, exported them onto a Pages document, changed the size, created text boxes, cut and pasted their words onto the page, and adjusted size, font, and color so that their words made the most impact. Very impressive! Here is an example of a page.

Kai's page.pdf

Posted at 4:11 PM| Permalink