Another pen licence!

A pen licence is something that is not taken lightly in year 4! I'm just delighted to say that another pen licence has been given out. A big congratulations!!

Week 3

Week 3 was a busy week as we continue to practice our concert item and had an open classroom evening in amongst our learning. We have continued to read Alison Lester's book, 'Are We There Yet' and discover significant sites and places of interest around Australia. We then transferred these to our map of Australia using compass directions such as north-west and south-east. We had to describe the direction of these cities and place names in relation to other places. During library research we used atlases to help find the oceans that surround Australia and the countries that are our nearest neighbours. Using atlases is a lot of fun! 

As we read our class book we have been looking for vocabulary that we don't know the meaning of. We've found words such as: gorge, plain, range, tapestry, telegraph. We've learnt about alliteration and have found more phrases using alliteration in the text as well as similes, such as busy as a bee. We used pictures from the book, 'Are We There Yet?' by Alison Lester and described them using similes, alliteration and as many descriptive phrases as we could to try and build a picture in the audience's mind. To check our work we had to underline nouns and check that we had used adjectives to describe most of the nouns. Some of us even looked at the verbs we had used and tried to add adverbs to our writing to describe the verbs. Our wonderfully descriptive paragraphs are almost at the point of being ready to publish. We've shared many of our best sentences with our peers and are in the process of editing our work to make it the best it can be. We should be able to share some of these with you shortly!

In maths we have continued to work on our tables and learn more about time to the minute as well as some early algebra and problem solving. It has been great to make connections with our learning in maths. Some of us recognise that a clock is broken up into equal parts like fractions are. There are also the words like half past and quarter to and quarter past that make us think of fractions. Making connections with our learning helps to make the concepts we learn stick! 

We learnt about main ideas in reading groups this week and got to practice finding the main idea of articles we read, a behind the news segment we watched and some stories we read. We used the idea of a table to help us find the main idea and then used the four legs of the table to show that the supporting details are there to hold the table top up or the main idea. We also used a hand outline to help us find the main idea. The palm of the hand was where we wrote the main idea and the fingers were where we wrote the supporting details of the text we had read.

Our beautiful underwater artwork is slowly coming together. We have learnt about the Great Barrier Reef as part of our look at significant sites around Australia. We had to draw tropical fish that you would find in the Great Barrier Reef and stick that on a painted background. We're now including coral in our painting and have Sienna bringing along some real coral for us to look at. We are so lucky!

The posters we are creating in our computer lessons are almost ready to print! We have had to research a significant land form and find out interesting facts about it, the way it was formed and a dreamtime story related to it if there was one. I love the three sisters dreamtime story! I look forward to sharing these great pieces of work with you all soon.

What a great week of learning!