Dewey Decimal GAMES

Want to test your Dewey knowledge? Have fun playing these games.

http://www.purposegames.com/game/1410

Review Quiz

Bingo

Matching Books to 100s - Easy
Matching Books to 100s - Medium
MatchingBooks to 100s - Hard

Name the numbers

Multiple Choice

Doing Dewey

After Grade 4 students investigated several Dewey Decimal 100s categories, we practiced assigning topics to those categories.

Each table received a stack of cards with information like "You want to find crafts to make at your birthday party" and "You want to find a map of Japan." Students worked together to figure out where they'd go to find the information and paste them into the correct column of their "gameboard."

There were some heated discussions. Where would cats go versus tigers and lions? What about the history of dinosaurs?

Even if students didn't put a card in the right column, they got credit for having a good reason for choosing the one they selected. We don't all think the same way as Melvil Dewey!

Being able to categorize information is a skill that students will use in the future, from structuring writing assignments to organizing computer files.

Do YOU know which 100s to look in for the following topics?

• You need to do a report on hurricanes.

• You need to show your classmates how to do origami.

• You need to find a recipe for pancakes.

• You need to learn about what life is like in Brazil.

Wordling Dewey - 4G

Have you ever used Wordle? It's a neat Web program that takes words and creates a colorful collage with them; words that you enter more frequently have more prominence.

We're using it with Grade 4 as we try and figure out how Melvil Dewey divided up all of the world's knowledge into 10 main categories.

This week, 4G explored the shelves, selecting a variety of books on different topics from their assigned 100s ... and then tried to figure out just what their category was. We entered some of the topics into Wordle. As you can see below, some Dewey categories are a lot easier to figure out than others.

National Spelling Bee is Coming!

Mark your calendars for May 31, when the finals of the National Spelling Bee will air on ESPN2. Rhode Island's contestant is from Cumberland!

Anyone who leaves a note in Ms. Moore's mailbox by the last day of school with the name of the 2009 winner gets to pick a free book from the donation box! (Hint: Fourth graders just found the answer last week when comparing whether the table of contents or the index works faster when searching for specific information in the Kids' World Almanac. You can also find it on the Spelling Bee site.)

Fun fact from their web site: XANTHOPHYLL is the word Laura Ingalls Wilder misspelled in an 1880s community spelling match. Read more about it in Little House on the Prairie.

Rumpelstiltskin Summarized

In fourth grade this week, we practiced the Somebody / Wanted / But / So / Then method of summarizing a story. Here is what the students came up with for Rumplestiltskin:

• The miller's daughter wanted to make straw into gold, but she didn't know how. So the fat and chubby man came and did it for her. Then he wanted something in return.
  
  
• The king wanted the girl to spin gold, but she didn't know how. So Rumplestiltskin came and said he'd do it if she gave him her baby. Then she didn't want to.
  
  
• Rumplestiltskin wanted the baby. But his heart softens a bit. So he says that if the queen can guess his name, then he won't take the baby.
  
  
• Rumplestiltskin wanted the baby, but the girl cried. So he said she had three tries to guess his name. Then she sent her servant to find out.
  
  
• Rumplestiltskin wanted the miller's daughters baby. But the miller's daughter guessed his name, so he threw a fit and then rode away on a spoon.
  
  

Rumpelstiltskin Retold

Source: http://www.penguin.com.au/

We have started a unit on summarizing with the fourth graders. To practice the difference between retelling and summarizing, I read Paul O. Zelinsky's Rumpelstiltskin to 4F, 4FR, and 4G. Then they retold it back to me.

Here is their version, made up of verbatim quotes from each class (Note: Some verbs have been updated after 4F declared that "'Said' is dead."). We were not yet successful in writing a three-sentence summary. If you want to try, leave your summary in the comments!

+++

The miller had a beautiful daughter. One day she ran into the king. She wanted to impress him, so she told him her daughter could spin straw into gold.

The king took her [daughter] into a room filled with straw and told her to turn the straw into gold.

A little man came in and said what would she give him if he spun the straw for her? So she said she would give him her necklace.

Then the next day the king told her to spin more, because he turned greedy. He told her to spin this much hay, and it was more. The little man came back and said what will you give me? And she said her ring. And gave it to him, and he spun the straw into gold.

Source: http://www.paulozelinsky.com

The next day, the king got more greedy and told her to spin more straw into gold. The straw almost filled the whole room!! The king declared, “If you finish turning all this straw into gold, then you will marry me.”

Rumpelstiltskin walked in and he asked, "What do you have for me?" And the girl cried, "Nothing." And he replied, “Very well, then you will give me your son when you get married to the king.” She thought that she might never have a baby, so she agreed that she would give it to him.

After the marriage, one year later, she had a baby, and then Rumpelstiltskin came into her room. He demanded, “Give me what you promised.” And then she pleaded for him to take anything else. Rumpelstiltskin said, “I’ll give you three days to find out my name, and if you do, then you can keep your baby.”

She kept on guessing names every day he came in. The first night, she tried to remember all the names she knows. But none of them were right. Then the second night, she went around town trying to find new names that she didn’t already know, but none of them were it either.

Then she sent one of her guards to go up all in the high mountains/forest. The servant found Rumpelstiltskin. And he was singing a song and it had his name in it, and the guard ran as fast as he could back to tell her the name.

The next day, she gave him two names that weren’t right, to get him thinking that she didn’t know it.When she said the name, he said “The devil told you that!” And then he got onto a spoon and flew away.

ALTERNATE ENDING: She tells him his name, and he stomps his right foot and it goes through the floor, and he stomps the other one and it falls off.

Source: http://www.paulozelinsky.com/rumpelstiltskin.html

Dewey Decimal number for fairy tales: 398.2

Grade 4 Maps and Atlases

Finding Costa Rica

To coincide with the Grade 4 unit about Geography, we explored different kinds of maps in the library. For example, a physical map shows land features like deserts and mountains, while a political map shows man-made borders delineating states and countries.

Physical maps don't change much during a century, but political maps often do. As I told the students, "When I was your age, there were two Germanys and one giant Soviet Union." (To which Luke replied: "I thought you were going to say that when you were our age, you were 10.")

Finding India

Then students learned about longitude and latitude ... did you know that Rhode Island is on the same line of latitude as France, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, and Japan?

Next, they learned how to find locations on the globe using measurements like 42 N 71 W... not the easiest concepts to master, especially if you haven't covered angle degrees and spheres yet in math!

Equator = 0 degrees N/S
The Poles = 90 degrees N/S
Prime Meridian = 0 degrees E/W

Using what they had learned - and helping each other when necessary - the kids managed to find their assigned countries in the atlas as well as on a giant world map.

Using the Prime Meridian to find Morocco

Dewey Decimal number for atlases: 912

Grade 4 Pet Research

Lulu wants a brontosaurus for a pet ... but fourth graders were able to think of lots of reasons why that might not work out so well. So we set out to find information on more appropriate indoor pets.

First, we collected data on the kinds of pets that fourth graders have at home (Note: we had to carefully define that a pet had to be living in your house on purpose, and your parents had to let you touch it. Mice in the basement and a snake once glimpsed in the yard did not count). Then we practiced math skills by reading tables and bar charts displaying the information.

Here is one of the tables:

PETS	4G	4S	4W	4BR	4F	4FR
cat	9	8	11	9	7	12
lizard	2	1	1	2	3	2
rabbit	6	2	3	2	2	2
hermit crab	4	2	1	0	1	6
crayfish	8	1	1	1	6	1

Sample questions:

• Which class has the most students with pet crayfish?
• How many students in 4BR have pet rabbits?

Next, the students created lists of questions that a pet owner would need the answers to. The assignment was to come up with two questions per person in the group; most groups went well above and beyond this requirement. They also graded each other on effort!

Finally, we practiced using a table of contents to find the answers to the most common questions.

Dewey Decimal for pets: 636