Year 4 Update – Wk 17
Tuesday 10th January – Year 5 Bake sale
Friday 13th January – Explorations trip (see below)
Wednesday 25th January – Chinese New Year Performance at 6pm
Thursday 26th January – China Day, school ends at 3pm
Monday 6th February – First day back at school
Wednesday 8th February – Marie Merchand Parenting workshop @ 6.30pm
Explorations trip – Friday 13th January
Letters for the upcoming explorations trips have been sent out this week and most reply slips have now been returned. If you have not replied yet, please do so as soon as possible, many thanks. By now, your child should have informed you which of the three trips they are going on (fortunately we were able to accommodate every student’s first or second choice of destination).
The destinations are…
Braemar Hill, Hong Kong island – Mr Thompson and Ms Wu
Shep Kip Mei Art Centre – Ms Fisher
Hong Kong Park and The Peak – Mrs Fennelly and Ms Mak
Many thanks also to all the parents who have volunteered to help, we are extremely grateful. The teacher leading each trip will be contacting you via email today, however, as we have had so many volunteers, unfortunately we will not be able to take all parent volunteers on this occasion.
Portfolios
Please make sure your child has returned their portfolio!
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)
Having learnt about a range of explorers in class (including Sacawagea, Roald Amundsen, Marco Polo, Gertrude Bell and Zheng He) over the past weeks, the children will begin to think about a different explorer they would like to research in more detail. They will be undertaking research and planning towards creating a poster to persuade others that this was the most significant explorer there has been. This will allow the children to utilise some of the persuasive writing techniques they have been learning about through our English work. We will also be thinking about presentation skills and learning about the C.R.A.B. design rules (Contrast, Repitition, Alignment and Balance).
Central Idea – Objects and events have attributes that can be measured using appropriate tools.
Lines of Inquiry:
- Read and write the time to the minute and investigate the relationship between units of time.
- Convert between the units of time.
- Describe time and duration (elapsed) in terms of am and pm.
The children will participate in a series of open-ended tasks on telling, converting and describing time, such as planning a trip around Hong Kong using the times given on the MTR journey planner.
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
The children will revise their mental strategies for subtraction and complete open-ended, rich tasks with a subtraction focus. They will revisit and extend their knowledge of written strategies such as column method with re-grouping and undertake some related problem-solving tasks.
- to argue a case from a particular point of view
- to attempt to convince the reader/listener
Over the coming week, the students will be continuing to deconstruct persuasive texts and utilising the features of this text type when writing their own expositions. We will be particularly focusing on…
- supporting arguments/reasons with examples and sufficient evidence/detail
- using emotive language to effectively persuade others
Comprehension Key: Summarising and Synthesising
In the next weeks the children will reflect on their reading and make note of how their thinking changes in the process. The sentence starters in the image above will be modelled during class/ guided reading of fiction and non-fiction texts.
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 – Ongoing
D.I.Y.
We’ve been so impressed to hear about the enthusiasm and progress students have shown over the holidays working towards their patches on DIY.org. Please continue with this for the remainder of this unit of inquiry. Don’t forget to blog about your progress on your class blog! Also, take the time to comment on your friend’s posts too.
*It is an expectation that the children devote some time at home to develop some new skills over the next few weeks and post their experience on the class blog as they progress through tasks.
