Yr4 Curriculum Update – 25/01/19
Working together to achieve success for every child
Transdisciplinary Learning – It’s all connected!
The natural world inspires creative expression.
UOI & Literacy
What a creative and inspiring two weeks it has been in Year 4! Students have put their knowledge of the elements of art to use while also exploring the elements of design. They have had the opportunity to learn about the various materials used in art such as clay, newspaper and water colors. They have also engaged in applying the techniques artists use when creating 3D models, sketches, prints,and collages. They have inquired into the different perspectives that present themselves when viewing a particular piece and shared their views with the class.
Students have also explored the different stages of the creative process and talked to experts about the stages and processes they go through when creating their work. Then they created their own piece inspired by artist Georgia O’Keefe. Students used their skills of metacognition to reflect on their work and identify what steps and processes of the creative cycle they went through.
These experiences have provided some wonderful inspiration for our poetry unit. Students continue to learn about the various literary devices such as alliterative sentences, similes and metaphors. They have incorporated some of these into their examples. Students have explored the various forms that poetry may take such as shape poems, diamante and personification poems. Also, they have been practicing reading aloud examples of poetry which has enabled them to better understand the language, meaning, rhythm and rhyme of these poems.
In reading, students are examining text organization, and language features to determine what impact these conventions have on a piece of writing. In addition, they have been using ‘see, think and wonder’ pictures that help them to infer the meaning of a poem.
Unpacking the central idea.
Keywords: natural world, inspiration, expression, creative cycle, artist, three dimensional.
Consider exploring these keywords in your children’s mother tongue to help comprehension.
Maths
Our Central idea is:
The four operations are connected to each other and are used to solve problems.
Students continue to construct visualizations of the various ways in which we can multiply numbers together. Many have been on the hunt looking for arrays, groups and other real-life examples of multiplication that they can find in their environment. Some have started to turn these visualizations into number sentences. Furthermore, students have looked at finger tricks that will help them learn the multiplication tables. We encourage our students to use their fingers in maths as we now know through brain research that the use of fingers is essential to Mathematical achievement and supports our students in being able to visualize mathematical concepts like multiplication.
Key maths vocabulary:
Visualise – can you create an image in your head which shows the problem?
Connections – how does the problem/situation connect to other things?
Questions – what questions can you ask to deepen your understanding?
Multiply, times, groups of, lots of, repeated addition, product, array, divided by, share equally, group, divide into.
Mandarin
In the Chinese classrooms, we continue to focus on the concept of wellbeing and providing different learning opportunities for children to explore their own interests and promote agentic learning.
Here is a glimpse of some of our Classrooms:
Reminders
- The school disco this Friday January 25th, 2019 has been cancelled until further notice.
- Our Y4 camp meeting will take place on Thursday January 31st at 3:00 pm in the library
Important Dates
Thursday 31st January Y4 Camp Meeting (3:00 pm in the Library)
Friday 1st February CNY Assembly (1:30 – 2:45 pm)
Monday 4th – 8th February Mid-term break
25th February – 1st March Book Week
27th and 28th February Book fair
1st March Book Parade
6th to 8th March Year 4 Camp
