First Week of Fourth Grade - Oak Meadow Style

As I was planning my lessons for fourth grade this year, I came across this in my Oak Meadow syllabus, "This curriculum is not intended to be a rigid set of guidelines. It is a tool to help you enter into the subject matter in a creative, experiential way. Use it accordingly, adding and subtracting as best suits your child's needs and interests." (Oak Meadow Fourth Grade Syllabus, Introduction)

I like to see this kind of creative license mentioned in a curriculum syllabus. I prefer hands-on, experiment based learning, and Oak Meadow offers a perfect blend for our family of prepared lessons and open-ended creativity. So, it is with great excitement that we begin the fourth grade program this week. My daughter will also be doing Oak Meadow, but she will be doing the high school curriculum. I plan to try and post about our progress in each.

I read ahead a few weeks in my syllabus to get an idea of how to plan the first weeks of school. This program uses the main lesson book, a blank book for capturing the written work of each student. We have used main lesson books for many years and I LOVE having a written record of the student's work in book form. It is a portfolio that builds itself. I ordered some of the main lesson books Oak Meadow sells for this purpose. I like the onion skin between the pages to keep the work safe from smears. I also like the size of the pages and the quality of the paper. The information in the syllabus about journaling is excellent. I plan to have journaling time daily that will go into one of these main lesson books.

The first big assignment is the topography project. This idea lends itself to studying maps, your local landscape, and a bit of local history. Because I work in the Children's Room at our local library, I can always find fantastic books to bring home on the topics we study. I will try to remember to post our book lists as we go along.

Friday is our first day of our Oak Meadow co-op. The 4th graders will be going on a nature hike of the property to observe the land. This is the beginning of their topography project research. We plan to examine some books about physical and topographical maps. We are going to look at a tray of items and then draw a "map" of the items on the tray. Hopefully this will help them think about how it might feel to "look down" on something and draw what you see. We have plans to look at google maps of the area to give us an idea of what an aerial view would look like.  There is much more going on this week, art, music, math, geometry with fruit, cursive practice, reading practice, etc., but this gives you a little peek into the fourth grade life. It looks like it will be a great year! Here is a sneak peak of the fourth grade co-op class for Friday:

Book to read aloud to the group for discussion: Seven Blind Mice by Young

Journal topic for Friday: perspective

Book to read at home and prepare a book report project (3 week project): Stuart Little by White