Year 4 News

From Kajaal, Year 4 teacher 

Reading

This Term in Reading, we have begun the Reciprocal Reading Program (book clubs). In class we been having lots of fun figuring out all of the different roles in our reading groups. Each group is named after a different New Zealand lollie!  Every day a different group will read with our teacher. First we decide our role out of: literary observer, word detective, questioner, summariser and predictor. Then, we get the book we will be reading for the term and amongst ourselves, decide which pages or chapters we will read for the week. 

We have also started reading a new class novel after we finished our last one: Edward Tullane. Our current novel is called Alex Rider- Stormbreaker. It is about a spy agency called MI6 that hires Alex to finish off the mission that his uncle started. We can’t wait to hear what happens next!

Writing

Deserted in the ancient pyramids, sharks circling me under the sea, running from a jaguar as fast as my legs will take me, it’s teeth sharp as knives. What do all these things have in common? ADVENTURE! In Writing we got into groups and chose our adventure and settings for our book week display. 

We have also picked out goals for ourselves in writing. We picked things that we wanted to get better at and chose some tips and tricks to help us achieve the goals. Some of us are going to be working on using writer’s voice while others will be focusing on sentence structure. We will check in with our teacher once a week to see how we are going with our goal.

Maths

To kick off the term, we have been revisiting place value, starting with renaming numbers. It was fun when we used MAB blocks on Polypad and could see the blocks being ‘split’. This made it easy to see how a number can look different but the value stays the same! Like 235 can be 23 tens and 5 ones or 20 tens and 35 ones. This week we played a game called ‘Decimat’ the aim of the game was to fill out the whole game board to reach ‘1 whole’. We had to record our decimal numbers as we did it so we could see our running total. We found that it was lucky to roll a tenth number because then we could colour in more of our mat!