PLT Spotlight...

Year 4 News

It has been such a busy start to the year in Year 4!  Our Year 4’s have settled nicely into their classrooms and have enjoyed getting to know their teachers and learning to work together.

We have enjoyed building our love of literature with students enjoying sustained reading each day and using this time to ask ourselves questions about the books we are reading to better comprehend them.  We have also been learning about an Author’s Purpose for writing and exploring the text features that help us to understand and navigate a range of fiction and non-fiction texts.

When writing, we have written recounts about our holidays and ‘Our Best Day Ever!’  We have also been exploring exposition (persuasive texts) as we try to convince our teachers to let us get a class pet – more about our pets later… 

In Maths, we have continued exploring place value and number through partitioning and rearranging numbers.  We are moving into identifying number patterns and are looking forward to learning more about multiplication next term.  Practising our times tables these holidays will be helpful!  We have also explored 2D shapes and 3D objects through constructing them – and then deconstructing them to explore their nets.  Currently, we are asking questions and collecting data so we can learn how to represent data in ways such as graphs and tables.

Inquiry lessons have also been fun this year as we focus on learning about Biological Science, which is the science of living things.  We first learned about the difference between living, non-living and once lived and then moved into learning about the lifecycles of living objects. In our classrooms we explored the lifecycles of bean plants; and this week, 4B was the first to receive their class pet… which was a heap of mealworms!  At first we were a little grossed out. But then we learnt that mealworms go through a metamorphosis and become a beetle – how cool is that?  We are really looking forward to watching our mealworms change over the coming weeks.

Foundation

It has been a very busy term for our new Foundation students!  Our students have settled into their new grades beautifully and we have seen them transition into full time learning over the last couple of weeks.  This has allowed them to really dive into their learning.   Throughout the term so far, we have been focussing on how to recognise, read and write our names and we have also been completing lots of letter practice through our Little Learners Loves Literacy program.  As part of this learning, our students have also been able to enjoy participating in Language Experience activities such as making Milo the Monkey cookies.  Our students have also been experimenting with their knowledge of letters to write recounts about their weekend and of stories we have read in the classroom.  In Mathematics, we have been learning to recognise numbers and collections, one to one counting and exploring the meaning of more and less.  It has been wonderful watching the students begin to build friendships and learning how to be respectful members of our school community through circle time, the Respectful Relationships Program, and our School Wide Positive Behaviours Support Program.  We are looking forward to nurturing our students throughout the year and watching them grow academically, emotionally and socially.

Kate Brittain, Elise Edwards, Jessie Van Dyk and Lianne Ilejay

Foundation Teachers