Year 4 News

Phew… what a busy start to 2024 we have had! 

It’s always so exciting to start the new school year, to see friends and teachers again after holidays, to settle in to our new classrooms, and once we had caught up with everyone, it was time to start… labelling! We gathered all the stationery needed for Term 1 and got to work. It took a long while, but once it was done, we felt organised. 

In the first few days, we stayed in our own grades but then we came together in our Year 4 common room to vote on what we would call the space - we decided on ‘The Year 4 Floor’. This is where we have Fun Friday and hot/wet day timetable activities and it is great to spend time with friends from 4A, 4B & 4C. 

We collaborated in groups and came up with our 2024 Essential Agreement, focused on our school values of Respect, Care, Empathy, Responsibility and Trust.

The swimming program at King Club was loads of fun but we were exhausted at the end of the 9 days. It was great preparation for our first ever House Swimming Carnival last week! The sun was shining and we had a fantastic morning at GSAC with all the Year 4, 5 & 6 students. 

Trent from the Cybersafety Project came to visit and talk to us about ‘Who we are online’. He reminded us about the different spaces online – Private, Personal and Public - and what should be shared in those spaces.  

We have been learning about the United Nations Constitution on the Rights of a Child, within our Sharing the Planet unit of inquiry. There are 42 rights and one of our tasks was to categorise them under these three headings: ‘Basic Needs’, ‘Safe From Harm’, ‘Express Themselves’. Our Central Idea is, ‘All children have rights regardless of who they are,’ and it was tricky to choose between the three headings because most of them seem like basic needs that all children should be entitled to.  

In Maths, we have revised Place Value – Mrs Duffy was shocked and surprised that we were able to read a 23 digit number! We are now moving on to Multi Digit Addition and Subtraction with regrouping and enjoying activities and games on Mangahigh and Essential Assessment. 

Most of the work in our Writers’ Notebooks has been ‘All about me’, but we have also been focusing on ‘Ideas’ when writing persuasive and procedural texts. It is great to know that there is a real purpose for our writing… sometimes it is to convince someone of something, and other times it is to instruct someone on how to do something.  

We are always encouraged at BNPS to communicate respectfully and we have been practising this with our RRRR lessons and through The Resilience Project activities. We did group mimes to try to communicate messages and we realised that sometimes things can get lost in translation if we are not careful. We know how important it is to develop our emotional literacy so that we can express our feelings and seek help if necessary. 

It is hard to believe we are already halfway through Term 1 – it has certainly been busy but lots of fun!