Ms. Downing is a sweet teacher. She teaches  reading, spelling, and math. Some students go to different groups for reading, spelling and math. Ms. Downing hands out auction money.
If you are quiet or if you are doing what she has asked you to do, you can earn auction money. We have an auction at the end of every month. She has a lot of prizes and we can bid on them. She will say "Going Once, Going Twice, Sold!" and then throw the object to the winner.
    When we have read aloud we get to lay on pillows and drink water. When Ms. Downing finds a simile in the book we are reading, the class yells out "SIMILE!" A simile is when two different things are compared with the word like or as. There are two certain groups that get the pillows every day.
Everyone gets a turn, but not everyone gets pillows every day, because there is a pillow recorder that changes the pillow groups, and how he does it is there is a little spot on the chalk board that has the pillow groups number.   To make things neat there are jobs and a job chart that every  week it gets changed same as the student of the week.
      All the class loves the rocket math that she teaches. Rocket math is a paper with 40 equations on it. You have to meet or beat your goal in a minute. If you do succeed in meeting your goal, then you can color in your rocket. There are so many different levels of equations. The papers are labeled from A to W ! There are 23 different levels. Each level is more difficult.
        Every Friday the pillow groups get to do current events.
     In science, we are studying moon phases and going to be studying about meteors and comets.

    In fourth grade, we get to do an instrument or chorus. The flute is the most popular in the fourth grade. There are six flute players in the fourth grade. There are three fourth graders that are taking trumpet and four clarinet players in our grade. There are also three trombone players and three percussionists. There are two saxophone players in the group as well. So you can see, we have a lot of instrumentalists in our grade! The saxophones can play very loud compared to the flute players.
     In Chorus, we have to sing songs. We practice on Thursdays during recess. Mrs. Ross has a CD that she uses with other people singing on it.  Sometimes she will take that CD out and put in one that just has the accompaniment on the CD without the singing.
    As you can see, the fourth grade sounds pretty fun! We love fourth grade.

    By Megan, Abbey G., Lane and Jack M.