16 Jun 2017

Year 4 Update – Wk 34

Monday 19th June – 4L return Fitness bands

Monday 19th June – All home reading books to be returned. Children to continue home reading by using Reading Eggs and Big Universe.

Wednesday 21st June – Fitness bands to go home with 4W
(Return on Monday 26th June)

Friday 30th June NOON – End of school year!

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EARLY LEAVERS!

If you are going on holiday early this year, please let your child’s class teacher know as soon as possible.

4F – Mrs Fennelly – charlotte.fennelly@bhs.edu.hk

4L – Miss Fisher – laura.fisher@bhs.edu.hk

4W – Miss Wu – jane.wu@bhs.edu.hk

Beacon Hill School Action Day!

This is a call for all parents who work in or have connections to food distributions companies.

Next year, BHS is hoping to support Sunshine Action through organising a food drive to help HK’s poorest, but this can only happen with your support. Please see the poster below for more information.

Fitness Tracking!

As part of your child’s Y4 unit of inquiry into the challenges, benefits and responsibilities of new media we will be giving the students the opportunity to use fitness bands. Mr Teahan and Mr Lowe are supporting this initiative through PE and ICT lessons. Through the use of fitness bands, we would like to track your child’s activity levels and show them that digital technology can also impact on health. As many of you will know, a fitness band is a device worn on your wrist and it counts the number of steps you take, measures your activity level and sleep quantity and quality. We will reflect on the data gathered at school and inquire into different ways your child can become more active. It is important to emphasise that we will be using the idea of ‘Personal Bests’ to challenge students to become more active rather than comparing students. Your child will receive the fitness band on a Wednesday and keep the device until the following Monday, see dates below:

4F – Wednesday 7th June until Monday 12th/Tuesday 13th June

4L – Wednesday 14th June until Monday 19th June

4W – Wednesday 21st June until Monday 26th June

Below is a guide on how to look after the fitness bands. They should be worn at all times, except when your child is swimming, showering or bathing. Please note the device should not be removed from the wristband under any circumstances. If you have any queries please contact Mr Andy Thompson at andy.thompson@bhs.edu.hk

*UPDATE*

4L are currently wearing their fitness bands proudly and thoroughly enjoying syncing up our data to an iPad each morning to check our progress!

Learning Centre Stocktake!

There will be no further borrowing from the Library this school year, in order for a large stock-take of all the books to take place. Your child will return their books this and not borrow any further books until next academic year. Thank you for your understanding.

Parenting in the Age of Digital Media

If you have any concerns regarding digital media (apps, online games, movies, websites, etc) your child is accessing, then you may find the common sense media website very useful. It has reviewed many popular online games and given them suggested age ratings in order to help parents make informed choices.

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/reviews

Swimming!

Just a reminder that your child must bring goggles, a swimming cap and sunscreen every Wednesday for the 3 remaining swimming lessons.

Swimming: Rain Stops Play!

Tropical Cyclone Merbok, brought some thunderstorms to Hong Kong earlier this week, which unfortunately meant that the Year 4 swimming lessons had to be cancelled on Wednesday. Let’s keep fingers crossed for more clement weather next week!

Using Digital Media to Learn a New Skill

The children have been having lots of fun learning a new skill through digital media. They have used resources such as video tutorials on YouTube and explanations and suggestions on DIY.org to guide their learning. They have been totally engaged and motivated by this self-directed learning experience. The range of new skills learnt has been vast: from learning freestyle football moves to learning computer animation, from improving their drawing skills to learning how to sing songs, the children have really excelled themselves. The classes have also reflected back on what were challenges and responsibilities involved in learning a new skill through digital media.

GV Action

Many of the Year 4 students attended a talk this week given by a group of Year 9 KGV students. The secondary school students were taking action to raise awareness of animal cruelty. They gave a talk and then got our students involved in some games and activities. There were also some yummy treats available in a bake sale, the money raised going to an animal charity. It was great to see our Year 4s supporting this cause and wanting to be involved in making the world a better place!

How We Organise Ourselves

Central Idea: The way we communicate information through digital media can bring challenges, benefits and responsibilities

Lines of Inquiry
An inquiry into:

How new digital media is used and organised (function)
Benefits and challenges of new media (reflection)
Our responsibility in virtual environments (responsibility)

Next week the children will be working on teaching a digital media skill, such as how to make a game, use google docs or how to create a Powtoons. They will need to stick to their Action Plans, designed to help them improve their self-management skills, and will make use of screencasting tools to create their own tutorials.

As mentioned above, this week the children have been continuing to use digital media to learn a new skill. See below for more photos of what’s been happening in 4L!

The children have been continuing with stop-checks based on their end-of-year Maths assessments. Each class teacher is looking for trends within their classes, based on the assessments data, to determine which areas their class needs reinforcing ready for Year 5.

Writer’s Workshop: Writing to Inform

Next week the children will write a class constructed information report about an area of digital media. They will then move onto planning and drafting an independent report on a similar topic.

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Comprehension Key: Determining Importance

The children will continue to identify important information from a range of texts (i.e. written, visual)

Golden Book Certificate winners were …

4F – Cassidy Li

4L – Naomi Mcloughlin

4W – Garnet Lau

PE – Aggie Shum, 4L

homelearning

Year 4 – Digital Media Home Learning ~ Self-Management: Organisation 16.6.17

This week the children will do some further work at home connected to digital media and self-management skills.

One of the benefits of using Google apps in school is that the children can create, share and collaborate on a host of different documents, drawings, slideshows, etc. However, the challenge this brings is that their Google Drives can often get overloaded with material, documents are hard to find and information gets lost.

Our responsibility, therefore, is to develop organisational skills, systems and strategies that help us keep track of our online learning.

This week, for home learning, the children need to

Create a folder for each Unit of Inquiry, for English, Maths and for Personal documents.
Delete any blank documents, drawings, etc.
Ensure all documents, etc are named
Create a folder titled 2016-2017 and move all Year 4 work there.

Optional: Look at how to colour code your folders! Think about how you can get organised for Year 5. Perhaps start by setting up some folders already!

Daily home reading

On Monday, all home reading books will need to be returned and borrowing will cease. However, please continue with your home reading by using Reading Eggs and Big Universe and recording the titles of the online books you read in your Reading Journals.

Spelling

The children will have 10 new words to learn each week (Friday) and will be tested on them by a classmate three times per week. The words they have consist of some vocabulary relevant to our current U.O.I., some words relating to the spelling rule that we are currently learning about and some words of their choice.

Year 4 Update – Wk 34

Communications

News

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