Who, and what, we are is fundamentally shaped by where we live. The geographic study of Place, with its focus on the natural and human attributes, was the lens 4-F used to tackle this first unit of the year. The students in 4-F first tackled this whole idea of identify when they wrote their own Place poems about the area that they called home. Those poems are listed in a special section of this web. Then, they went on to their study of  the Japanese haiku master-Basho. Interestingly, this year is 300th anniversary of his pivotal work The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In researching Basho, the students focused on:

They then published what they learned using both print and the electronic media. Please click on the stations names to read what the student pairs wrote. This particular study also dove-tailed exceptionally well with the 4th grades study of haiku and printmaking. Also, the whole elementary school was luck enough to be able to have Tim Meyers of Basho and the Fox fame, come for an author visit in November. The class generated a great bulletin board that included their study of Basho, origami foxes, drawings of Basho along with haiku and prints from the 4th grade October Bunka event. It was a tremendous effort for beginning fourth graders and they did a fine job!

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