Viewing: Class Updates
August 19, 2011
Coming Attractions: Fourth Grade!
Welcome to fourth grade in Room 209! Enjoy this welcome “trailer” and the introductory post below!
[hana-flv-player video=”http://edvantaged.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/PGS-Welcome-Back2.flv” width=”720″ height=”405″ description=”Welcome to Fourth Grade” player=”4″ autoload=”true” autoplay=”false” loop=”false” autorewind=”false” /]Be sure to read my welcome message in the next post!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
August 19, 2011
Welcome to Fourth Grade
- Mr. Moss with Suzy Kline, author of the Horrible Harry book series and the Herbie Jones series.
Hello! Welcome to the online home of PGS Room 209. During the school year, I will update this web site regularly with information about activities happening in Room 209, bulletins and news items, current events related to what we’re studying in social studies, online assignments, and much more.
About Me
I graduated from the University of Rhode Island summa cum laude in 2004 and have a degree in Elementary Education and Psychology. I also have a Masters Degree in Educational Technology at Central Connecticut State University‘s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Technology. In addition to my teaching role at Pine Grove School, I am our school’s lead educational technology teacher and work to help teachers integrate technology into their teaching in meaningful and valuable ways.
This will be my eighth year teaching at Pine Grove School. I taught third grade at PGS for five years before moving to fourth grade. While at URI, I taught grades 3, 4, and 5. I have also taught kindergarten, first, and second grade summer school, and I have interned with an elementary school principal in East Hartford. I have a background in experimental research in the field of social psychology, so you’ll probably see my interest in research and statistics come through this year during math lessons!
- Charlie and I after he got his first haircut this summer!
I live locally with my wife, my son (Charlie), and our dog (Rimley). In my spare time, I like to travel to Rhode Island, Boston, or New York City. I also enjoy making movies on my Mac, working on home improvement projects, or just relaxing by cooking, listening to old time radio shows from the 1940s and 50s, reading comic books, or watching the news. I collect old reel to-reel tapes of music, antique or unusual telephones, and all things related to Star Trek.
I enjoy tinkering with my computer and coming up with interesting ways in which I can use technology in the classroom. (You can definitely expect to use computers a lot in Room 209! I enjoy using computers, our class’ SMART Board, and other technologies while teaching.) Of course, I also love watching my favorite sports team, the Boston Red Sox! (Don’t worry Yankees fans, I promise not to be mean!)
It’s going to be a great year in fourth grade. There are so many new things to learn, and there are some really interesting activities coming up! I can’t wait for the new year to begin!
For more information about our class, click “Read the rest of the entry”.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
August 16, 2011
Inspector Tymlyn
I hope you’re all having a wonderful summer! I enjoyed teaching a few enrichment courses at PGS in July and just returned from a vacation to see friends and family in New Jersey and Maryland. Fifth grade is right around the corner. I’m sure there’s lots of talk about transitioning to TBS; please accept my best wishes for a pleasant and easy start to the school year!
During the school year, we enjoyed a special treat: R.S.’s dad is an author and gave us the chance to preview the first few chapters of his novel for young adults! As the school year wrapped up, he was kind enough to develop a website that our students could use to continue reading the story online (since we only got through the first few chapters in class). I should have posted this information many weeks ago and apologize for the delay.
Interested readers can continue enjoying the story by visiting http://www.muhre.com/tymlyn. Enter the password: mynd-fynd
Please remember that while the story is available on the web for you to enjoy, it should not be copied off the website where you can read it, nor should it be redistributed. If you have any questions, please email me and I’ll relay them to the author.
Enjoy the last few weeks of the summer!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
June 12, 2011
Summer Birthdays
We will be celebrating summer birthdays with a pizza lunch on Tuesday. I’ll order the pizzas, but any parent would like to volunteer to pick them up and bring them to us at about 12:15, I’d really appreciate it! If any parents of kids with summer birthdays (or any birthdays in the remaining week of school) would like to contribute a dollar or two to help cover the pizza, please feel free! I’ll cover whatever is left. Kids who aren’t pizza fans are welcome to bring their own lunch, but I’ve told the school kitchen that they should not expect us for buying lunch. If you’re able to pick up the pizzas, please email me. Thanks! Happy final full week of school!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
June 9, 2011
Product Taste Test – RESCHEDULED
Tomorrow’s product taste test activity will be rescheduled for Monday. Sorry for the last minute change. I need the time to finish some activities from this week, and it’s easier to move the taste test since it’s more isolated. Kids can still feel free to bring in the products tomorrow.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
June 9, 2011
Expository Writing (By #19)
On May 11, the class worked on a outline for an expository article. The title was Why I love Baseball and we learned all about main ideas and supporting details. The class also did homework where we had to write down 3 reasons why we love our favorite sport, that we will soon turn into an expository article. We are also currently working with Mr. Giannini’s class to write an article about Japan by watching a short film.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
June 7, 2011
Number the Stars
Over the past month, we have worked on a joint social studies and reading unit about the Holocaust. In early May, we were fortunate enough to have theater educators from The Hartford Stage come to our class each day for one week to begin the unit with a dramatic study of Lois Lowry’s famous novel Number the Stars. Where a traditional book study would have started with some background instruction about the holocaust, our theater educator, Summer, started by diving into the story with the kids. The students had some incredibly rich discussions about the events that occurred in this sadly realistic piece of historical fiction. One of my big focuses was helping the kids to make reader-text connections to the text. These sorts of connections are very important to comprehending text, and (fortunately) these students have a hard time connecting to the events of the Holocaust.
After the week-long Hartford Stage residency ended, we started reading the story together. Although I was initially skeptical about how interested the kids would be in the story (since they already knew how many of the pivotal moments ended up), I have been so glad to see that the kids have been tremendously interested in the story. We’ve had meaningful and thoughtful conversations about the book; the likes of which I’d not previously seen this year. This book has also been a tremendous opportunity to learn about thick and thin questions: questions that are in-depth and thought-provoking or shallow and fact-oriented, respectively.
Today, we finished the book. It was a wonderful conclusion, and we had some terrific discussions about the book, character voice, and much more! I’m so proud of the kids. I’ll be out of the classroom tomorrow, but the kids will continue to work on activities relating to the book.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
June 6, 2011
Saving Computer Files
Ms. Sigan has asked me to remind students and families that they have until June 17th to bring in a CD or flash drive if they would like to save their files that are on the PGS server. Generally, these files are things that were created in the computer lab. This is optional. All CDs or flash drives need to be labeled with the student’s name, class number, and teacher name.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
May 31, 2011
What else is going on in Room 209?
What a busy few weeks it’s been in Room 209! Besides the TUSS projects and presentations, we’ve been working hard on new math units, a special reading project, and more!
In math, we’re wrapping up unit 10, which is a fun unit about geometry – in particular, symmetry. We’ll be testing later this week (or early next week), so stay tuned! Because this was such a short unit, I also have several students who are still finishing up the recent math assessment. Once I have them all turned in, I’ll be sure to share the results with you. On that note, I want to apologize for the delay in sharing other recent math assessment results with you. I just realized that I never sent the scores home, and I’m very sorry for the mistake. Score sheets will go home with kids tomorrow.
We’ve had several assessments over the past few weeks. The Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) is administered to students individually twice each year (fall and spring). The kids have done a great job working on these over the past few weeks, and I’ve been very pleased with the students’ growth. We also just completed the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) assessment. This assessment gives students a series of cloze-style passages in which they must choose the correct words to fit into a blank spot within a paragraph. Finally, we have a few CFAs that we’ll work on over the next few days.
Last week, we went on a field trip to the Children’s Museum in West Hartford. What a great trip! We started off enjoying a planetarium show about the sun, earth, and moon. This tied in perfectly to the kids’ recent science unit by the same name. Later, the kids had an opportunity to try out some interactive stations that introduced them to a variety of concepts – among them, electricity. In the coming weeks, the kids will learn about electricity through a unit that Mr. Giannini and I teach jointly.
Stay tuned! In the next update: Number the Stars, Junior Achievement, and Expository Writing! Also, be sure to check out the first student article on the site! You can find it right below this post.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
May 31, 2011
The Exciting Computer Station (By #16)
I’m going to be talking about the computer station! You can do so many delightful things there. For example, you can make a hilarious story one sentence at a time! Everybody is allowed to join in. You can also write a serious story one sentence at a time! Also, if the computers didn’t have something wrong with them you could go on ichat. [Mr. Moss’s comment: iChat is configured to restrict conversation to our classroom computers ONLY, and I keep a log of the chats, so this is a safe environment for the kids.] Let’s hope both of them start working! You can also go on the calculator!!! Push in some outstanding numbers and watch them transform! If you want to have a whole lot of fun, you can play Math Magician and practice your math facts!!! If you write a super fantastic article, you might get the chance to paste it on the Mr. Moss’s class website. Isn’t that exciting??? That’s only some of it. There is much more!!! This is why we are so lucky to have the computer station!!!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss