Year 4 News
We can’t believe that we are only 1 week away from the end of Term 1!
In Year 4 our Sharing the Planet unit of inquiry extends along the whole year, with a focus on ‘rights and responsibilities’ in all areas of our school and family lives. Whilst consistently revisiting our Sharing the Planet themes, we have begun our next exciting Unit of Inquiry – How the World Works.
Throughout this unit we will be continuing to attend STEM lessons. These lessons will be hands-on experiences for us to learn and explore different properties of matter and how we interact with them. Within the classroom we will create a word wall, investigating new and related words. We will define and recognise the properties of solids, liquids and gases and investigate the changing states of matter.
We have been using our Writer’s Notebooks to create some fabulous concoctions using procedural texts. Our ‘Recipe for a Cure’ sure had some interesting ingredients and methods to cure weird and wacky ailments!
We will now be using our knowledge of procedural writing to write up our Science experiments all to do with the changing states of matter – Solids, Liquids and Gases. We are also continuing our Daily 5 activities including our weekly SMART Spelling focus, Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading (class novel) and Work on Writing.
Our visits to the library are a highlight each week – we enjoy a picture story book, then browse and borrow our own ‘good fit’ books. We love to recommend our favourite books to others, and always look forward to starting a new novel during Read to Self. Handwriting is also a focus and we are working hard at forming our letters correctly and incorporating speed loops.
We have enjoyed consolidating our knowledge of Place Value this term. Some of us were intimidated by the decimal point, but we now know that it just separates the whole numbers from decimal numbers (fractions of a whole number). Watching the ‘Math Antics’ videos with Rob has really helped with this concept! This week, we completed a written assessment paper and of course we are very confident with online testing too! Using these online skills we have also completed Mangahigh activities each Thursday, which is an online platform which allows us to learn and play at the same time! We have been focusing on Addition and Subtraction with multi-digit equations involving regrouping.
The Year 2 teachers organised a ‘buddy’ activity for the Year 4s to help their students with creating PowerPoint presentations for their current unit of inquiry. This activity was fun, but also a great way to share our expertise. The Year 2s were very impressed with our IT skills and they were super grateful for the support they received. We had to create slides, insert images, videos and voice recordings as well as jazz up the presentations with different fonts, colours, backgrounds and transitions. It was a great team effort, and we are all excited to share the finished products with the Year 1 students tomorrow.
Another highlight for the term has been welcoming our 2 new furry staff members to BNPS. We are super lucky to have Bonnie & Ziggy join us in Year 4! Mrs Badley and Ms Carter took their pups to Benalla to do the K9 training over the long weekend. They all worked very hard in the blistering heat and at the end of the 4-day training session, all 4 of them passed the course!
Bonie and Ziggy have already spent a couple of days together at school and are settling in beautifully, but after a long day’s work (& lots of cuddles) they are absolutely exhausted, so they need their rest days too! After they have been introduced to the rest of the students at school, they will be busy at work in their role as qualified therapy dogs.
It’s been a jam-packed term and we are all looking forward to recharging over the Easter break and 2 week holiday!