Welcome to all our Year 4 students and families.
We have had a great start to the year. The students are starting to settle into the routines of our neighbourhood and we are getting to know the students daily and through student conferences. In the first few days the students wrote a short paragraph about themselves titled ‘About me’ to give us a small window into who they are. Currently, the year 4 students are writing an essay on ‘My favourite things at school’ and are continuing to develop their understanding of text structure, using paragraphs, introductions and conclusions.
The year 4 students have really enjoyed setting up the Rights and Responsibilities of our neighbourhood. They have also developed a set of consequences when their rights or responsibilities are broken.
Students were introduced to the Inquiry statement last week, ‘We are part of the natural world’. We used the thinking routine, 3-2-1 Bridge, to extend our thinking and develop questions and wonderings. Students made many, varied connections to the statement. In the follow up workshop, students looked at the definition of ‘symbiosis’ an introduction to ‘The Forest in the Trees’. This text contained more technical and scientific language. Students reviewed and brainstormed questions, and chose one question to develop into a research question in the coming weeks.
In Maths, students were introduced to ‘Number Talks’ as a way to share their mathematical understandings and thinking. Many students expressed, while setting their maths goals, that they were interested in developing their understanding of division and we have made this our focus in the next few weeks.
We have hit the ground running, including developing SMART goals, drew self-portraits that show our connection to nature, created botanical drawings of plants and formed literature groups.
