Grade 4 News
Important Reminders
- Hats - As per our school's SunSmart policy, all students are required to wear hats till the end of April 2024.
- Shoe-box- as part of our Maths Investigation this term, students are required to bring a box the size of a shoe-box to hold all of the bits required for the task.
- Maths Masters- the students practise their goal every day. You can also practise your goal at home in order to increase numerical fluency. The goals can be found online here: Maths Masters Belts folder.
- Swimming- just a reminder that the Middle School will be embarking on their swimming program next week. It will save time if students wear their bathers underneath their school clothes. Bring along a small bag to hold items such as a towel, hair-brush, thongs, and clean underwear to change into.
- Middle School Open Morning- we are pleased to inform you that the Middle School will be having an Open Morning on Thursday 30th November. The classrooms in grades 3 & 4 will be open to family members from 9.15am until 10.00am. This gives students the opportunity to showcase the work that they have been doing this term.
Literacy:
We are in the midst of our Open Cycle for Literacy. That means that the students are dabbling in a variety of different genres for their reading and writing. So far they have looked at recounts, blurbs and persuasives. After the students analyse the various elements of each text, they have trialed writing in the same vein. The recount allowed students to relive their experiences at camp; the blurb will serve as an inclusion to their buddy books.
The students wrote their persuasive pieces on whether or not the Melbourne Cup should continue.
Some arguments for:
- it's fun and exciting cheering for your horse
- some people like to get dressed up
- the horses are loved and cared for
- we get a day off school
Some arguments against:
- sometimes the horses can get hurt
- people can lose money
- it looks like whipping hurts the horses
- some business people lose money when they have no customers that day
Next Week:
Although swimming will take up a considerable amount of time, the students will continue writing and publishing their buddy books. They will read and write descriptions, which will serve as a strong base when writing an information piece later in the term.
Mathematics:
For the past few weeks the students have been working on fractions of a whole, of a collection and representing them on a number line. Work was done with a fraction wall to show which fractions are smaller than, greater than or equal to others.
More recently the students have been exploring fractions more than one, remembering that the denominator determines the amount of equal pieces of one whole.
This week the students were introduced to decimals. The direct correlation was made with fractions where a shape is equally divided into ten equal pieces.
So 3 tenths can be written as 3/10 or 0.3
Lots of pictorial representations were made to consolidate this understanding.
Students have been continuing with their Maths Investigation by exploring capacity and temperature. They have learnt how to record different temperatures on a vertical number line (thermometer).
Next Week:
Although swimming will take up a considerable amount of time, the students will continue finishing off elements of their Maths Investigation. They will also continue their exploration of decimals, branching from tenths to hundredths.
Inquiry:
We have now begun the 'Sustainabilty' aspect of our Inquiry unit. Over three weeks the students will be looking at three areas of the topic: deforestation, theriocide, and water pollution. They will look at facts, reasons why it might be happening, and critically thinking about the impact on our earth.
Next Week:
The students will learn about the third area of 'Sustainabilty'.