Daily Archives: October 12, 2019

12
Oct
2019

New Unit in Year 4

Posted by year4

Peaceful Communities

This week we began a new unit.  The focus for this unit is Peaceful communities, but throughout it we will be exploring the following concepts:

  • peace and conflict
  • fairness and equality
  • perspective and empathy

Through these concepts the students will have an opportunity to better understand the causes of conflict and how they are able to use specific strategies to resolve any conflict situations they are in.  They will be doing this by learning in cooperative situations that will require them to resolve conflicts, by reading stories that help them better understand how peaceful communities can be maintained, and by furthering their understanding of Peace Talks and how they can be used to resolve conflict.

We will also be changing our focus in language and mathematics.

 

Math

For the next few weeks in math we will be learning about fractions.  These are the outcomes we will be covering:

Language

Students will continue to retell stories orally and in written form for the next couple of weeks.  After that we will begin unpacking a new comprehension strategy: inferences.

We usually begin by understanding what an inference is and then by making inferences about pictures before moving on to short texts and eventually longer and more complicated stories.  We generally want students to make inferences this way:

In other words, in order to come up with ideas about a story that the author hasn’t actually written, students will need to connect the clues they find in the text (or what they see in the pictures) with what they already know about a situation.

In writing, students will also be working with narratives.  The focus will primarily be on the organisation of a narrative, but we will also be exploring the best ways to get ideas for writing, and how to write long and short sentences (simple and compound) more accurately.

 

Camp

Year 4 camp is right around the corner on November 13-15.  There will be more information coming to you over the next month, but in the meantime please check out the Camp page.  There you will see the kit list as well as a general schedule for our three days.