4th Grade Loves Magnets!

We have been studying magnets this fall in science. It was fun to learn that opposite poles attract and like poles repel each other.

Different materials were tested to determine which were attracted to a magnet and which ones magnetic force would travel through.

Putting magnets under dishes with iron filings meant that we could see how the filings lined up in the magnetic fields.

Levitating magnets by putting like poles together was fun! We measured to see which combination of magnets would levitate the highest.

And....we created our own original magnet games and then presented them to the class!

At the end of the unit, we made our own magnetically levitated (mag-lev) train cars. Balancing them so that they would travel down the magnetic track was a challenge, but we persisted and were successful! After testing the mag-lev cars to see what could be done to make them travel farther, we prepared for the final race, using the knowledge we had gained from our experiments!

From the Library

Fourth graders started the year by reading an assortment of great, but maybe lesser known books in Library. Anne Isaac's Meanwhile Back at the Ranch reminded students of Riding Freedom which they read in third grade last year. The Bathing Costume or The Worst Vacation of My Life by Charlotte Moundlic was a story of a French boy who spends the summer with his grandparents in the country. Kate Coombs' The Secret Keeper led to an interesting discussion about listening and keeping secrets. The Cloud Spinner by Michael Catchpool, beautifully and amusingly illustrated, inspired conversation about greed and need and their impact on the environment.

From there we moved into World War II stories. I Will Come Back for You, in which a grandmother uses her charm bracelet to explain her childhood in Italy; Rose Blanche, in which a young girl smuggles food to children in a camp outside her German town; and Otto, the Autobiography of a Teddy Bear, in which a bear starts in 1930s Germany, saves the life of an American GI, and ends up in New York where he is recognized in an antique store and reunited with his childhood friends, now old men.