Connect: Year 4

Welcome to Year 4!

We have had a brilliant start to the year over the last two weeks and have enjoyed getting to know the students. Everyone has settled in nicely and are demonstrating their eagerness to learn. Our focus has been on 'Getting to Know You' activities, establishing daily routines and unpacking our School Wide Positive Behaviour framework and Expected Behaviours. We want to congratulate all students on their amazing work so far this term.

Our Next Fortnight of Learning 

Literacy

Students will be taking a deep dive into the short-story 'The Elves and the Shoemaker'. Our first focus will be the analysing of the formal language and complex sentence structure contained within. Each week students will be explicit taught carefully selected words. Students will learn and unpack the meaning of the word, the morphographs that make up the word, the part of speech the word belongs to, the history of the word as well as its synonyms, antonyms and words within its family. Our words will be accurate and acquire. These were last week's words.

Our writing will take two focuses over the next two weeks. Firstly we will develop our narrative plans that we will use to create our story of the following few weeks. The second focus is building a solid and deep understanding of the different sentence types.

Maths

Maths is all things place value. Place value is the foundation of all maths concepts and is essential for a complete mathematical understanding. As part of this learning process students will engage in a number of games which they will be able to play at home. Next newsletter we will share some of the games taught in class. 

Inquiry

Students have been working on developing their learning culture by practising good habits for our mind and social skills for how to work effectively with others. 

In the coming weeks we will be begin our first topic of Inquiry, "The Game of Life". Students will be taking a deep dive into understanding who they are, how they have changed and how they can better navigate challenging situations. 

Wellbeing

During Term 1, our wellbeing learning will focus on 'Stress Management'. During these sessions students will participate in activities to enable them to describe the influence people, situations and events have on their emotions. They will also explore strategies to manage physical, social and emotional change and role play how they can apply strategies in situations that make them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Students will explain the value of self-discipline and goal-setting in helping them learn and to cope with change and challenge. They will engage in activities that allow them the opportunity to describe their personal strengths to others. 

Home Learning 

In Year Four, we do not track home reading but expect students to read daily for at least 20 minutes. Students are also not provided with a tub of selected texts to choose from each day instead students are encouraged to read texts that excite and interest them. We have weekly Library sessions to support the selection of books and the home reading process. It is important that your child/ren have a 'Library bag' (this can be a their reading satchels) to ensure they can borrow each week. This will lessen the wear and tear on our library books. To support the Maths learning occurring in the classroom we encourage each child to practice their multiplication and division facts daily. 

Celebration of Learning