27 Oct 2017

Year 4 Update – Wk 10

Tuesday 31st October – Year 6 Bake Sale: BRING SOME MONEY TO ENJOY A DELICIOUS TREAT

Friday 3rd November – 4L Class Assembly at 9am

Monday 6th – Wednesday 8th November – Year 4 Camp

Wednesday, Thursday and Monday 8th, 9th and 13th November – Mandarin Consultations (Appointments via Gateway)

Tuesday 14th, 21st, 28th November and 5th December – Year 4 Pitch – Please note the change in date from the e-notice

Tuesday 28th November -Mandarin Consultations

Friday 1st December – PTA Disco (Year 4-6)

Friday 8th December – 4W Class Assembly at 9am

Thursday 14th December – Christmas Concert

Friday 15th December – End of Term (noon)

Monday 8th January – Start of School

CAMP

Vegetarians

Thank you for completing the eNotice for our Year 4 Camp. To ensure that we have the correct food for your child please complete the google form by clicking here if your child requires vegetarian food.

Medicine

We are checking the medical information you have supplied to us. Those who stated their child needs medication, will be sent a further form to fill out. This form states that you give your permission for us to administer the medication. It is therefore vital that this is completed and returned to us with the medication your child needs on the day of camp. If something arises in time from now until camp, resulting in your child needing medication, please do keep us informed and fill out the necessary permission letter. Many thanks!

Preparing Your Child

This week your child should have brought home a packing checklist for camp. If you do not have one, or if it has gotten lost, please contact your class teacher.

We would like the child to spend next week preparing for camp. In fact, it is even their home learning task (see home learning below)

Help your child get ready for camp in the following ways:

Make sure they can shower, dry and dress themselves.

Let them know which products will be in which containers. Having a practice now will help lessen confusion at camp.

Let them make their own beds.

At camp they will be expected to put a flat sheet on a mattress and a pillow cover on a pillow. They may also have to put a duvet cover on their duvet, so they would benefit a great deal from having this experience at home first.

Pack with your child.

Having choice over what they bring will give your child a feeling of ownership over their belongings. Knowing where everything is will help them find what they need. We strongly recommend using ziplock bags labelled for each day. Talk to them too about what happens if things don’t go to plan, such as an item of clothing gets dirty, or if it gets very cold. Show them where the spare clothes are.

Make sure all items are labelled, not just the ziplock bags!
Make sure they know their address in case of emergencies.

Pitch

Please note that the dates for our Pitch sessions are: Tuesday 14th, 21st, 28th November and 5th December

These dates have been amended from those stated in the e-notice you have received. Please make sure your child wears PE kit on these days. Class P.E. sessions led by the teacher will not take place while the pitch sessions are being held. However, P.E. with Mr Teahan will continue as normal.

Professor Peter Sullivan

Peter Sullivan is Professor of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, at Monash University in Australia. He is the immediate past President of the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers and was the lead writer of the Australian Mathematics curriculum.

Professor Sullivan is one of the world’s leading authorities in Mathematics, and will be making his a visit to Beacon Hill School this November. During his visit, Professor Sullivan will work alongside the teachers to challenge all our students to reach their full potential in Mathematics through the use of open-ended, rich learning tasks and problems.

We are thrilled to announce that Professor Sullivan will run a workshop for parents in order to enhance your understanding of how you may help your children in the development of Mathematical thinking. This is for parents only, there is no need for children to attend.

An e-notice should have been sent to all parents, please let us know if you are attending.

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.

SUNSHINE ACTION FUND RAISING

I am very pleased to announce, thanks to your generosity and the hard work of our students, we raised $150 000. This is a tremendous sum and I think it shows what a special community we belong to. We can now start to purchase the food so on 8th December our students can work with Sunshine Action at school to make the food parcels for the different charities.

To help our students with the food parcels we need parent volunteers, approximately 30. These parents will be working with groups of students to help them make the food parcels. If you are interested please click here.

ESF Christmas Card Competition

Christmas is fast approaching! ESF wish to prepare an e-card for Christmas and are inviting ESF students to come up with a design. The Christmas artwork could be a painting or drawing on A4 or A3 paper with any media such as water color, pastel, photography or digital. Please send the original artwork to Ms Yu by 13, November if you would like to enter this exciting competition. Please refer to this link if you wish to see the cards in previous years: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1e1HGWSZqL0clF3MlF2aWk3OEE?usp=shar

Y4 Teacher Contact Information

4F – Mrs Fennelly – charlotte.fennelly@bhs.edu.hk

4L – Miss Fisher – laura.fisher@bhs.edu.hk

4W – Miss Wu – jane.wu@bhs.edu.hk

Year 4 Learning Support Teacher – Ms Mak – haymen.mak@bhs.edu.hk

Vice Principal – Mr Thompson – andy.thompson@bhs.edu.hk

Analysing Data from the Stream Study … Continued!

Mr Thompson worked with 4L this week to look at, understand and analyse data collected from the Year 4 stream study.

Improving sentences

Students practised using FANBOYS (for, and, but, or, yet and so) as connectives to transform two simple sentences into one compound sentence.

Animal Research

Students worked with Ms Jeves and the class teachers to understand how to use the inquiry process to harness their natural curiosity and become more knowledgeable about living things.

Engage: The children have gotten engaged with this inquiry by first choosing their animal of interest to research. Using background knowledge as a basis to generate questions, the children have stretched themselves to think of even more that they can find out about.

Explore: The children have begun to locate and select more information about their chosen animal using Britannica (via the Beacon), the Learning Centre, including our range of National Geographic magazines, Big Universe and our class libraries.

Home Learning Sharing

The children’s second home learning tasks have been completed and shared. We are very impressed with the level of effort, growth in learning and enthusiasm shown.

Thinking and Collaboration Skills

Some students in Year 4 have had the opportunity to work collaboratively and engage their critical thinking skills by looking in detail at the every day objects that surround them. They have taken apart a variety of objects in order to think about the design behind them, using a thinking routine called Parts, Purposes and Complexities.

Sharing the Planet:

Central Idea

The Interdependence of living things can affect their survival.

Lines of Inquiry

An inquiry into…

Different types of livings things (Form)
What living things need to survive (Connection)
Human responsibility to the survival of living things (Responsibility)

Next week, we will be talking more generally about what living things need to survive and the children will be exploring the unit further by finding specific information to meet their research questions. These revolve around our lines of inquiry and concepts, such as what their animal is like (classification, appearance, etc), how it is connected to other living things (place in the food chain, habitat, etc) and our responsibility towards the survival of this animal.

Number Maths: Addition and Subtraction

Central Idea

The operations of addition and subtraction are related to each other and used to process information to solve problems

Lines of Inquiry

An inquiry into:

The different ways to model/show addition and subtraction
Mental strategies that can be used to solve addition and subtraction
Written strategies that can be used to solve addition and subtraction

Next week the children will be working with different addition strategies, such as jump strategy and partitioning.

Strand Maths: Data Handling

Central Idea : Different graph forms highlight different aspects of data more efficiently

Lines of Inquiry

How people collect and display data.
How data is interpreted

Next week the children will be looking at different animal statistics and thinking about how different graphs and charts can be used to present this data.

Writing to Inform

Next week we will begin our information report writing by looking at introductions and will begin writing our first drafts.

Handwriting: The students will also continue their joined handwriting practice.

Comprehension Strategy: Determining Importance

The students have been looking at strategies for finding important information in a text. They first need to have purpose, or a question in mind.

Next week they will continue to practise such strategies as predicting and finding key words and using nonfiction features – titles, subtitles, contents and index and topic sentences to locate information.

Due to the school photograph taking, Golden Book Assembly was postponed this week.

homelearning

Year 4 Home Learning 27.10.17

CAMP PREPARATION

This week’s home learning activity is to prepare for camp.

The children will need to

Make their bed (including putting on a pillow case and tucking in their sheets)
Label their clothes
Use the camp checklist
Pack their bags

Due date: Monday 6th November ~ Be Prepared for the Best Camp Ever!

Spelling

The children have a list of words they need to learn. They should practise these at home in preparation for “buddy spelling tests” (the children testing each other) in class next week.

Reading

The children have been given their Home Reading Journals and are expected to read for 20 minutes per day at their given comprehension age. Children will record the title of their book in their journal. Please discuss your child’s reading and leave a comment in the journal so that they can change their book.
To support their reading development, please make sure of the following:

Home reading should be fun not a chore.
Keep the timing short, find a comfy, quiet space and have a chat about what your child is reading. This really helps to develop their comprehension skills.
There is information about comprehension at the beginning of the journal, which you can use to help guide your discussion with your child. Please also refer to information your class teacher has sent out to you about how to help your child at home.

Mathematics
All children should aim to spend 30 minutes per week completing their assigned Mathletics tasks and/or practising their times tables.

Mandarin (All children are encouraged to take a reading book home on the days when they have Mandarin lessons.)

Ms Lynn (Home learning #6) – Please check your google classroom for details.