Year 4 Update – Wk 15
Wednesday 7th December – Year 4 Christmas party (see below)
Thursday 8th December – Final pitch session (wear P.E. kit)
Thursday 8th December @7pm – B.H.S. Christmas Concert
Friday 9th December – Dress Casual Day HOUSE COLOURS (see below)
Tuesday 13th December @12pm – END OF TERM 1
Tuesday 3rd January 2017 – TERM 2 BEGINS
Year 4 Christmas Party
Children can wear party clothes (Christmas jumpers optional!) on Wednesday 7th December. Please also send in the food item your child has chosen to share with their classmates on this date. If you send in a reusable container that you wish to be returned, please ensure it is clearly labelled with your child’s name.
Secret Santa
Please ensure the wrapped anonymous gift is sent into school by Tuesday 6th September. The gift should have a value of $50.
Dress Casual Day – HOUSE COLOURS
To raise the profile of the House teams and encourage a sense of team spirit, the Year 6 House Captains have decided that everyone should wear casual clothes on Friday 8th December. The casual clothing they wear must incorporate their house colour in some way…
DIVERSITY – green
CONFIDENCE – red
INCLUSIVITY – blue
HAPPINESS – yellow
Reminder: FRIDAY SPECIAL SNACK DAY!
A reminder that we will be sharing our surplus camp snacks with the children again on Friday 9th and Tuesday 13th December. Your child DOES NOT need to bring a snack on those days.
*Of course, if you would like your child to still bring snacks from home, they are most welcome!
Other reminders
Please make sure your child comes to school with a school hat EVERY DAY.
Please support us and your child by helping them create a positive impact on the habitat around them by bringing their snacks, lunches and drinks in reusable containers.
Where We Are in Place and Time
Central Idea: Change in our world can happen through exploration and discovery.
Lines of Inquiry
An inquiry into:
- explorations and discoveries that have changed our world (CHANGE)
- why people choose to explore and discover (CAUSATION)
We will be reading case studies of famous explorers in order to identify which information is interesting and which information is important in relation to their explorations of the world. The children will use key words to summarise their findings and to develop a greater awareness of some significant innovators from the past.
Central Idea – Objects and events have attributes that can be measured using appropriate tools.
Lines of Inquiry:
- The selection and correct use of standard units
- Solving real life situations using time, temperature, mass and capacity
We will be thinking about time in relation to the explorers we are learning about through our case studies and adding significant dates to a timeline in order to consolidate our understanding of centuries/decades/years and how these dates are recorded.
Number Maths: Operations – Addition and Subtraction
Central Idea – The operations of addition and subtraction are related to each other and used to process information to solve problems
Lines of Inquiry:
- The different ways to model/show addition and subtraction
- Mental strategies that can be used to solve addition and subtraction
- Written strategies that can be used to solve addition and subtraction
- Equivalent number sentences using addition and subtraction
Following on from our Toys’r’us task this week, we will be undertaking some further open-ended, rich tasks with an addition and subtraction focus. We will be focusing on three main addition strategies…
- column addition
- jump strategy
- compensation
We hope that following exposure to these different strategies the children will find a strategy that they prefer so they can work on this and develop faster written and mental arithmetic skills.
- to argue a case from a particular point of view
- to attempt to convince the reader/listener
Comprehension Key: Summarising and Synthesising
Through our UOI work, we will be developing our reading skills and focusing on summarising (our current focused comprehension strategy). In addition, we will be continuing to identify the text features of persuasive texts (exposition) and reflecting on and improving the persuasive writing we have already completed.
Daily home reading
A reminder that the colour of the home reading book your child brings home will reflect their reading ability at the end of Year 3. However, as reading assessments continue over the course of the coming few weeks, this may or may not change. PLEASE be reminded that the colour sticker on the reading book your child brings home is far less significant than the development of fluency AND comprehension. There is also an expectation that your child will read a book and complete any quizzes on Reading Eggspress twice a week.
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 Home Learning – UOI – 2.12.16
D.I.Y.
This week we would like every child in Year 4 to sign-up for a free DIY.org account. This site provides children with opportunities to discover new skills, upload evidence, receive peer feedback and earn ‘patches’ in a safe, monitored environment designed especially for children. We would like all children to create an account (there is an app you may wish to install, too) but this requires them to gain parental consent* so please assist them with this. They may wish to start earning ‘patches’ by completing projects and developing new skills or they may wish just to explore the website at this stage. Please take the time to do this together as this is a fabulous resource which provides excellent opportunities for developing new skills and making discoveries.
*parental consent – all parents will be receiving an email explaining this in greater detail.
Optional homework
This week the children may complete some of the activities in the booklet that they were given following our visit to the LEAP centre on Monday. This work is optional and there is no need to return any completed work to school, however, the students may enjoy consolidating some of their learning in this way.
