Grade 4 Community News
Dear families,
We are halfway through Term 2 and we are achieving amazing things in grade 4! We have completed our unit on swimming, and the students have worked hard completing assessments and making lots of growth in different areas of learning as the teachers start our report writing for semester two.
Reading
In Reading, we are close to finishing our Literature unit on ‘Birrung the Secret Friend’, which is a historical novel set in the early days of the Australian colony in 1790, shortly after the First Fleet arrived. It tells the story of a young orphan boy named Barney who lives with Richard Johnson, the colony's chaplain, and his wife, Mary. One day, they take in an indigenous girl named Birrung, and Barney’s life begins to change. Students have been exploring the themes in the text such as friendship and trust, courage and kindness, fairness and justice, and belonging. They have also discovered how certain topics are represented in the text, such as Indigenous culture. We unpacked answered questions in relation to different parts of the book and we justified our answers using the ‘RAP’ response; restate your question, answer the question and provide evidence to the answer to the question.
In Vocabulary, our words are continuing to be taken from the text ‘Birrung, the Secret Friend’. Our students have been excellent in using and applying these words to their historical narrative.
Writing
In Writing, we have been collaborating as a class to create our historical narrative using our prior knowledge of Australian colonisation and our class serial text ‘Birrung, the Secret Friend’. Students have been brainstorming ideas to use as their character, setting and problem, as well as applying language features to their writing such as personification (giving human feelings to a non-living object), specific nouns, dialogue and descriptive language.
Maths
In Maths we have completed our unit on length and area. We used informal and formal units to measure the length of objects, the perimeter of shapes and the area of shapes and spaces around the school. This week we began our unit on 2D shapes. Students are learning to identify and create 2 dimensional shapes, learning the vocabulary and calculating the number of straight sides, curved sides, or vertices a 2-dimensional shape has.
Swimming
In weeks 4 and 5 the Grade 4 students completed their unit of swimming down at Saltwater Swim School in Truganina. They learned the skills required in order to be safe in the water. They had so much fun!
Reminders:
Please ensure your child is reading every night and marking it in their reading journal.
Thank you,
PLC4