Yr4 Weekly Update – 28/10/16

 

Happy Diwali

This week we helped celebrate Diwali with our community through dance, art and stories. We hope that this festival of beauty brings your way, bright sparkles of contentment, that stay with you through the days ahead.

 

General

We have continued to unpack what we mean by communication systems. We are focussing on developing students’ skills in analysis as well as codes of behaviour through this unit. Different forms of communication have different purposes and uses and we are learning about how we behave differently in each system. Many of the key systems of communication for our 21st Century learners will be through social networks and learning how to behave and who/what to trust in these environments is essential for all of us.

Students have considered their preferred communication methods as well as using their creativity to design their own communication system.

 

Literacy

Students have begun to learn about using inferring and visualising as a comprehension strategy. Much of what can be understood from texts is ‘written between the lines’ – it must be inferred from the text. Visualising, or creating a mind picture, of what is happening in the text helps us to understand and respond to it better.

Our work on communication systems has given rise to some explanation writing as well as using ‘visual note-taking’ to help collect and understand new information.

 

Maths

We have been continuing to build mental and written strategies in addition and subtraction this week. It is essential for students mathematical confidence that they are able to unpack their written methods and explain the mental process behind the ‘algorithm’ so that they can identify errors and challenge themselves with more complex calculations.

 

Home Learning

Students can continue the work they have done on creating codes – ask them to write a coded message for you and see if you can crack the code.

Also, those children who are lucky enough to speak a language other than English may already have access to different alphabets. It could be a fun thing to try inventing your own written language, or creating new Egyptian hieroglyphs for modern things that did not exist in Ancient Egypt.