Year 4 Update – Wk 24
Monday 13th – Tuesday 21st March – Book Week: Dress up as your favourite book character on Monday 20th for the character parade!
Thursday 16th March – Y5 Market Day: Bring some money to buy some goodies and support a good cause!
Friday 24th March – International Food Fair: Keep selling those raffle tickets to win the class excursion!
Thursday 30th March – Spring Concert
Friday 31st March – End of Term 2 – Easter Holidays Begin! School ends at 12:00 noon.
Tuesday 18th April – First Day Back at School
Tuesday 25th April – Year 4 Bake Sale
Thrusday 27th April – Year 4 Theatre Trip
Tuesday 2nd May – BHS CPD Day: School Closed
Book Week and Character Dress-up Day
Seven days of ABCs and 123s
We are all looking forward to our Seven Days of ABCs and 123s which begins on Monday 13th March. This year we will be having special activities to celebrate the special link between Maths and books. Has your child joined our pattern photo competition? If not details are below.
Dress Up Day – Monday 20th March
Our traditional dress up day will take place on the 20th March. All the children and staff in school will dress up in costume. We encourage the children to be creative and imaginative with their costume. So please try and avoid football kits or the children coming as themselves!
To celebrate the collaboration between books and Maths, this year the children can choose to dress as a book character or something maths related.
Here are some pictures to inspire your child’s creations.
Photo competition- Closing date 21st March
Seeing and understanding pattern is very important in Maths for many reasons, for example to improve our knowledge of shape and space, to help estimation and solve problems in algebra. Pattern is also very important in the English language, it can be seen in spelling, sentence structure and of course poetry. Many stories follow a pattern too and understanding this can help develop children’s comprehension. This year our photo competiton celebrates pattern.
Your child needs to take a photo on the theme of pattern and send it to Ms Jeves at the following address: jevese2@beaconhill.edu.hk Please can you make sure the subject header for the photo contains your child’s name and class. Closing date: 21st March.
Health and well-being
As you will have seen in notices sent home recently, there have been some cases of scarlet fever and chicken pox at the school. We would be very grateful if you could remind your child to wash their hands frequently throughout the day and to stay home if unwell.
This week in Year 4 the children have been exploring different ways to represent common fractions. They worked in groups with the task to find different ways to show a half and a third. Some of them were so engaged that they wanted to challenge themselves and show other fractions too!
We’ve also been fortunate to have some wonderful writers visit BHS this week – the children themselves that is! The children have engaged in different writing workshops that focus on and develop different aspects of narrative writing, such as punctuating and writing effective dialogue, showing, not telling and planning the plot. They then applied the different skills they practised to their point of view narratives. The resulting narrative writing highlighted the students’ growth in their learning about writing.
Lastly, Ms Yu has been supporting Year 4’s artists by teaching the children some drawing skills. This week she worked with 4L and focused on portrait drawing. We noticed Miss Yu’s example portrait looked like her and she told us how it’s quite common for artists to draw themselves without even realising it! Have a look at the photos below and see if you think the portraits resemble their artists!
How The World Works
Central Idea: Changes to the Earth and its atmosphere can impact the natural world
Lines of Inquiry
An inquiry into:
- How the different components of the Earth are interrelated (connection)
- Why the Earth has changed and is continuing to change (change)
- How we know the Earth has changed (reflection)
Summative Task: Choose a natural phenomenon/event and create a flow chart to demonstrate how this event changes/has changed the Earth.
Next week the children will begin by exploring the structure of the Earth and will look at its different layers as well as its land masses.
Central Idea – Fractions and decimals are ways of representing whole part relationships
Lines of Inquiry:
- Constructing and representing equal parts of a whole
- Identifying, ordering and describing fractions using mathematical language
- Understanding the relationship between fractions and decimals
Next week the children will be delving further into the wonderful world of fractions by finding out more about the language of fractions, as well as ordering and comparing different fractions. Of course, there’s the Maths and Literacy Book Week too, and we will be reading an Ed Emberley text to help us understand more about adding fractions.
Purpose: Writing to explain
Big idea: Authors explain clearly how and why things happen
Related Language Concepts: Word choice, causal connectives, technical vocabulary, audience
Next week we will look at examples of explanation texts. We will also enjoy the story Until I Met Dudley, and use this as a provocation for our own explanations.
Comprehension Key: Questioning
Next week the children will be recording their own wonderings about a text.
In addition, as next week is Book Week, there will be lots and lots of reading and English activities, such as decorating our classroom doors!
Home Learning 10.3.17 – Questioning
Wondering about texts and asking questions helps us to understand new texts. Therefore, this week, your home learning task is to get curious about your reading!
Think of questions about one of your home readers (or another book, if you like!) and record them on the “wonderings” sheet your class teacher has given you.
Tips To Help You Think of Questions!
Before: Look at the cover, the title and blurb, etc and get curious about what the book is about. Jot down any questions that spring to mind.
During: As you read the text, make a note of any questions you have; for example, you might want to know more about a character, the place, or the events in the story.
After: Are there any questions you still have about the text?
You could also ask yourself questions about your thinking and about how much you understand!
Daily home reading
Please check to make sure your child is taking home home reader books at their level, or reading books on Reading Eggs at their comprehension age level. 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.
