Year 4

Learning in Year 4

Hello fabulous Year Four Families! What a term we have had already! We have seen our beautiful students blossom and develop this term. The Year Four students have been working incredibly hard to adapt to the new way of teaching and learning and we are so proud of their achievements so far.

Literacy 

In Literacy, students have been enjoying the new structure of our Literacy block. Our new Literacy block is now broken up into six different areas; Oral Language, Phonics, SMART Spelling, Morphology, Creating Texts and Literature and Comprehension.

During Phonics, we are focusing on a range of different skills, such as segmenting a word. Students are hear a word and they need to segment into the sounds that they hear, using the action of 'chopper hands’. For example, the word sigh, they would ‘chop’ the word into the sounds ‘s’ and ‘igh’. By practising these skills orally students are able to transfer this knowledge into their reading and writing. We are also focusing on Morphology and the study of words and their parts. Students are enjoying learning about the different parts of a word and how this can help them with their reading and writing. This week we focused on the prefix ‘un.’

In Literature and Comprehension, students have really been enjoying analysing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Students have been learning about making connections to themselves, other texts and the world around them. In addition to making those deep connections based on the characters emotions and traits, students have looked at how character traits have shaped events within the text and been able to analyse how certain character traits influence characters decisions. 

Maths

Over the past few weeks students have been focusing on practising their multiplication facts. Students have been doing an amazing job at memorising these and have been coming to school excited to share how they have been practising their multiplication facts. In addition to multiplication, students have been exploring angles that they see in their environment and comparing the angle sizes to a right angle. Students have also begun to explore the idea of giving directions through using the features of map and learning how to use legends and keys to interpret information on a map.

Geography

Students have really enjoyed their Geography unit so far. Every morning we start the day with playing a game of Global, where students use their knowledge of continents and countries to guess the mystery country. Students are enjoying adding a new country to their class map each day.  Students have also created their own passports to use when they travel to different contents each week. When they ‘travel’ to the new continents each week they are learning about the main climates of the world and the similarities and differences between the characteristics of places in different locations.