Year Four News 

Hi everyone, 

What an exciting two weeks it has been in Year Four! We’ve had incursions, excursions, wrapping our Units of Inquiry up, conducting science experiments, recording Christmas Carols, showing how far our learning has come through assessments as well as working hard to complete our portfolios.

In our next newsletter edition, you will be able to read about all the excitement and fun we had on our much anticipated and twice postponed Melbourne Zoo excursion.

Inquiry

Recently, we have finished our Unit of Inquiry Four which focused on community and how these are created. We were extremely lucky to take part in an incursion from the West Gate Kids Tunnel project, which allowed students the opportunity to follow a design brief and as a class, create their own city. Our students thought of everything! Roads, bike paths, schools, car parks, hospitals, houses, skyscrapers, even solar panels, and signs were included. I don’t think we can explain just how impressed we were with the level of work that was produced, so we’ll let the video do the talking…

Reading

We have continued to focus on analysing and critiquing different text types. This week, we investigated Saltwater College’s cyber safety policy. Students unpacked the policy, clarifying language and discussing the interpretations of the information. They then determined how effective this policy will be using their analysis as a means of justifying their thinking. 

Writing

Our Year Four students are such amazing writer’s and their work on creating their own procedural texts. Their use of verbs and adverbs has certainly improved as well as their ability to write detailed instructions in a cohesive manner. Their ability to analyse their own and their peers work is certainly coming along too. It was amusing to watch their reactions to their first efforts of writing procedure texts compared to their final published text.

Maths

We think this must be our favourite unit of maths so far. Who knew geometry could be so much fun!? Our students have been focusing on transforming shapes and how they can be moved or changed to look either the same or different. Tesselations were a hit where students had to manipulate shapes to create a repeating pattern that had no gap. We started with squares, moved to triangles, octagons and then the challenging lizard. Students also conducted a mini investigation into symmetry; finding letters, country flags with symmetry and even if their own face was symmetrical. There certainly was some laughter for this one! These next few weeks will be focused on probability.

Carols

This week we have also had the amazing experience of recording our class chosen Christmas carols with Mr Lapina. The look of excitement on their faces when they heard their own voices played back to them as well as the enthusiasm for being back in the music studio was wonderful to see. We cannot wait to see and hear the final product in a few weeks time.

Bully Zero Incursion

This incursion was an informative session focused on our rights, responsibilities and strategies to create a world free from bullying.  Thank you to the wellbeing team for organising this valuable incursion.

We look forward to another brilliant fortnight of learning!

Year Four team

Amberly Morison, Deanna Kotevski, Christina Assaf, Rachel Kreymborg, Todd Robinson