Year 4

Year 4 April Newsletter 

Hello Year 4 Families and welcome to Term 2! We hope you all enjoyed your school holidays and had a restful break. We are so excited to have the students back in the classroom and for new learning to begin! We had such an exciting Term 1 and enjoyed ending our term with the celebration of our our Easter Bonnet Parade. 

Ruby, Reet, Harleen, Ashrayee & Michelle from 4A and their amazing Easter Bonnets. 

Literacy 

Students are continuing with their Spelling Mastery lessons this term and are excited to begin exploring Word Work lessons twice a week also. This week’s focus is on the jobs of ‘silent final e.’ Our daily fluency practise is focused around our Knowledge Unit this term. Students are reading passages about the respiratory system while focusing on their accuracy, rate, prosody and punctuation. 

Writing

We have wrapped up our focus on persuasive writing and begun our new focus for Term 2. We are learning about informative texts and using structured paragraph outlines to write cohesive and well thought out paragraphs. We are practising this by writing topic sentences and supporting details about the respiratory and circulatory system.

Knowledge 

Our Knowledge Unit this term is Health: Respiration and Circulation. Students have been learning about what happens to their bodies when they exercise, they have explored how their breathing and heart rate changes from when they are resting to when they are exercising. Students have learnt about the structure of the respiratory system. They have labelled the upper and lower respiratory system and identified what each organ's function is in helping our bodies to breathe. Students have learnt about ways the body protects the respiratory system. We have learnt about the different parts of the lungs and the function of the alveoli in breathing. Students know about the factors that affect breathing such as air quality and pollutants. 

Investigation 

As part of our  Knowledge unit we complete one investigation lesson each week. Last week we learnt how to measure our heart rate and our breathing rate. Students measure both while at rest and then after running for 2 minutes. We discussed what the changes were and why they occurred. 

This week our investigation lesson centred on learning more about ANZAC day by reading the book ANZAC Ted by Belinda Landsberry. 

Numeracy

This term we started off by revising topics and concepts that we covered in Term 1. We will continue to do this as part of our daily review (this is to ensure our learning is stored in our long term memory!). Each day we complete a 10 minute exercise from our ‘New Waves Mental Math’ workbook, we complete the questions independently and then correct the answers as a class. We have continued to build upon our addition knowledge by solving problems that require us to regroup. We use regrouping in addition when the sum of two digits in the place value column is greater than nine. 

Following on from last term, we have been calculating elapsed time to the minute and using grid references to help us locate landmarks on a map. During both of these topics we have engaged in real life activities such as calculating elapsed time when travelling from one destination to another and giving directions using grid references.   

SEL

Our Resilience Project lesson last week focused on character strengths. Students learnt about different strengths and identified those strengths in someone that they admired. They then identified their own character strengths.  This week we have been learning about the significance of ANZAC day and why it is important to commemorate the day. Students have read books and watched Behind the News videos to learn more about our ANZACs. 

Auslan

This term we started our Auslan lessons with a review of the signs we have learnt previously. We have learnt about Deaf culture. Some important aspects of Deaf culture we have learnt about are: eye contact, Auslan, get attention before communicating by waving arms, lightly tap arm or shoulder, lights on/off.