Year 4 Update – Wk 16
Tuesday 3rd January 2017 – TERM 2 BEGINS
Friday 13th January 2017 – Explorations trip
Wednesday 25th January 2017 – Chinese New Year Performance at 6pm
Thursday 26th January 2017 – China Day, school ends at 3pm
Monday 6th February 2017 – First day back at school
Wednesday 8th February 2017 – Marie Merchand parenting workshop at 6.30pm
Explorations trip after Christmas
In order to support their current unit of inquiry, the children will have the opportunity to visit a place in Hong Kong that they have not visited before or would like to explore. The children will be able to choose to visit one of the following places. Letters and more detailed information will be sent out on the first few days of school in the new term:
– Flower market and bird street in Mongkok
– Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei
– Wong Nai Chung Gap on HK island
– Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park and tram ride on HK island
The children will make their decisions on where they would like to visit next week. This will allow the teachers to plan the excursion accordingly and find out how many parent helpers would be invited. Please keep a look out for the letter after the holidays if you are interested in offering your help on the day of the trip.
Portfolios
Portfolios will be sent home at the end of the term. This is a great opportunity for your child to reflect on their learning with you. Please have your child return their portfolio to school on Tuesday 3rd January, 2017, when we come back from the holidays.
*If your child will be missing school or leaving on holiday early, please notify your class teacher so she can make sure that your child brings their portfolio home on their last day.
Pitch visits are over
The children enjoyed their last session at the pitch this week. Normal PE lessons will resume after the holidays, please be mindful of the days in which your child should come in wearing their PE kit.
Just one more thing…
On behalf of all the Year 4 teachers…
Other reminders
- Please support us and your child by helping them create a positive impact on the habitat around them by bringing their snacks, lunches and drinks in reusable containers.
Where We Are in Place and Time
Central Idea: Change in our world can happen through exploration and discovery.
Lines of Inquiry
An inquiry into:
- explorations and discoveries that have changed our world (CHANGE)
- why people choose to explore and discover (CAUSATION)
The children will continue to learn about famous explorers in history and deepen their understanding of why people choose to explore. They will also choose where they would like to visit on the explorations trip next week.
Central Idea – Objects and events have attributes that can be measured using appropriate tools.
Lines of Inquiry:
- Read and write the time to the minute and investigate the relationship between units of time.
- Convert between the units of time.
- Describe time and duration (elapsed) in terms of am and pm.
The children will participate in a series of open-ended tasks on telling, converting and describing time.
Number Maths: Operations – 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:
- 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
- Equivalent number sentences using addition and subtraction
The children will revise their mental strategies for subtraction and complete open-ended, rich tasks with a subtraction focus.
- to argue a case from a particular point of view
- to attempt to convince the reader/listener
Comprehension Key: Summarising and Synthesising
In the next weeks the children will reflect on their reading and make note of how their thinking changes in the process. The sentence starters in the image above will be modelled during class/ guided reading of fiction and non-fiction texts.
Daily home reading
A reminder that the colour of the home reading book your child brings home will reflect their reading ability at the end of Year 3. However, as reading assessments continue over the course of the coming few weeks, this may or may not change. PLEASE be reminded that the colour sticker on the reading book your child brings home is far less significant than the development of fluency AND comprehension. There is also an expectation that your child will read a book and complete any quizzes on Reading Eggspress twice a week.
Spelling
The children will have 10 new words to learn each week (Friday) and will be tested on them by a classmate three times per week. The words they have consist of some vocabulary relevant to our current U.O.I., some words relating to the spelling rule that we are currently learning about and some words of their choice.
Year 4 Home Learning – UOI – 9.12.16
D.I.Y.
Over the next few weeks, for the remainder of this unit of inquiry, we would like every child to have a go at collecting a patch from DIY.org.
In school, the children will have some time to explore the website and decide on which patch they would like to collect. In order to earn the patch, they must present and upload evidence (photo/ video) for three tasks within their chosen category. The children will have access to a digital log sheet so that they can keep track of their progress and they will also be expected to post on the class blog upon completion of any task.
*This is an open home learning task that is not due in on the first Friday back from school. It is an expectation that the children devote some time at home to develop some new skills over the next few weeks and post their experience on the class blog as they progress through tasks.
