Grade 4 Community News

Reading

In Reading, our students have concluded their unit on African Kingdoms. They finished off their final week by learning about the stories of significant ancient African leaders such as Mansa Musa and his famous pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, the escape of the two Songhai princes, Ali Kolon and Sulyaman Nar, and how Askia Muhammad became a leader. The grade 4 students loved concluding their learning about the different ancient African kingdoms and empires.

In Week 8, the grade 4 students began their Literature unit on our class text, ‘A Long Walk to Water’. We have been reading this text since the beginning of the term, and it follows the stories of two young people, Salva and Nya, living in Sudan. Our students have been engaging in discussions and ‘stop and jots’ to explore how the book’s setting, South Sudan, is represented in the text. They have also learned about the Second Sudanese Civil War, analysing how this is represented in the text by looking at various excerpts from the text. They have been enjoying learning about some nonfiction information to help them understand more about certain events that have happened in ‘A Long Walk to Water’. 

Our vocabulary words are continuing to be taken out of the text ‘A Long Walk to Water’. 

Writing

In Writing, our students worked incredibly hard to complete their post-assessment for their information reports. They spent their first writing session in week 7 planning their single paragraph outlines (SPO’s), using their notes that they had taken in Reading 2 Learn on African Kingdoms. Our students were able to use their voice to decide what they wanted their body paragraphs to be about. After this, they drafted their complete information report by turning their notes into full sentences and including an introduction, conclusion and diagram. Finally, the students revised and edited their writing for correct punctuation, spelling and word choice. The end result was outstanding, and the students (and their teachers) were so amazed to see the growth in their writing from the beginning of the unit to now! They were able to move their name on the Bump it Up wall, which made their progress very visible.

In Week 8, our students started their new writing unit on persuasive texts. They have been introduced to emotive language through various writing exercises, which is a language feature that they will be using in their writing to persuade their readers to feel a certain way.

Maths

In Maths, our students have been learning about Shape. In week 7, they used their knowledge of 2D shapes and their properties to combine and split different shapes. The students had a lot of fun making and splitting different composite shapes, and were able to use this knowledge when solving worded problems. In week 8, they again used their knowledge of shapes from the previous weeks to find the area of different regular and irregular shapes. Students concluded the unit with their post-assessment, demonstrating growth in their learning and understanding of Shape.

Reminders

• Holidays are fast approaching! The last day of Term 3 is on Friday the 20th of September. Students will be finishing at 2:30pm. 
• In Term 4, students will be learning about Time in Maths. It would be great if parents and families could practise reading the time at home using analogue clocks, and modelling language of telling the time (for example, ‘quarter past’ and ‘quarter to’).

Thank you,

PLC4 🙂