Year 4

It has been another busy term for the year four cohort with many more interesting activities to come.

We have been working extremely hard to improve our writing skills through both our literacy block and our genre writing. We have made chatterboxes and fruit salad and written a matching procedural text. We are continuing to develop our narrative writing skills and the students are sharing some wonderful original ideas to write about.

Maths

The students are making great leaps in understanding the relationship between mathematics taught in the classroom and that used in the everyday world. Through explicit instruction, the year 4s has been learning about place value of numbers, adding and subtracting decimals and division in Term3. We also learned how to calculate Volume of 3D shapes, Area of regular shapes and calculating elapsed time. Part of our everyday math lessons are our warm-ups where we revise the key concepts and basic facts taught. Students are presented with a variety of questions of the same concepts on a PowerPoint and encouraged to show their understanding on mini whiteboards.

Science

We have been investigating living things and their life cycles this term. Students have practiced drawing labelled diagrams and life cycles to represent their new understanding of germination and the anatomy of broad beans, bees and flowers. Students participated in a germination investigation in which they exposed broad beans to warmth and water – the conditions that allow them to transition from a dormant stage to a living plant. Students have enjoyed recording data based on daily observations of their growth.

HASS

We used cross curricular teaching for Bookweek. The students have been learning about Australia’s First Fleet in HASS and 4B created costumes to reflect that event. Not only did the students reflect on and consolidate their knowledge about Australia’s beginnings as the nation we know today, but also on the hardships faced by the fledgling colony. We constructed and painted the ships of the fleet and the balls and chains of the convicts. The students assisted in preparing the costumes. We are currently learning about the continent of Africa.