YEAR 4 NEWS

NIST We are beginning our second unit of inquiry for the year. It comes under the organizing theme of Where we are in place and time. Our central idea is:

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Where we are in place and time

listening to each other. Students will be focusing on their expressive language and will be assessed on the following indicators: They expressed thoughts, ideas and opinions and discuss them, respecting contributions from others. They understand that language use is influenced by its purpose and the audience.

Access to opportunities is determined by borders and citizenship.

We will be inquiring into this through the concepts of FORM, CONNECTION and RESPONSIBILITY. Our Lines of Inquiry are: Access to natural resources The impact the physical environment has on people and society Inter- political, social, economic, geographical (natural), language borders

Students will also be focusing on their receptive language and will be assessed on: I can Following on from our first unit Who discuss my own feelings in we are students will have the response to visual messages; lisopportunity to create and display their ten to other responses, realizing learning visually and orally. Students that people react differently. will be sharing their learning to their peers and will they will be selfassessing and also peer assess each other. Viewing and presenting will allow them to be more confident communicators while also We will be taking a field trip to Muang Boran (Ancient Siam) - due to the possibility of flooding, this date is not set as yet. More details will be posted on our blogs closer to the time. We also have a guest speaker coming to speak to us about her work with refugees. Both Thai Studies and ICT will link closely with this unit.

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YEAR 4 NEWS: Where we are in place and time

TRANSDISCIPLINARY LEARNING

Language Arts:

Written Language - Reading and Writing We will be using both fiction and non-fiction text during this unit of inquiry. What are the features of non fiction text? (form) How can we develop real life concepts from fiction? (connection) As the students become more familiar with these features we aim to see them being included in their own writing. Viewing and Presenting This will be closely connected to our unit maths work. We will be learning to interpret symbols, layouts, charts and maps. ICT will support this too. Listening and Speaking Our guest speaker, and other conversations will give us the opportunity to learn more about oral text. We will be learning more about picking out main events and relevant points. Listening attentively and speaking appropriately in small and large group situations. Describing personal experiences Asking questions to gain information.

Mathematics: Conceptually we will be bringing form and connection into our maths work too. We will be looking at: Space and shape - this will link strongly with our mapping. How can we describe the position of something? We will Understand that directions can be used to describe pathways, regions, positions and boundaries of our immediate environment. Understand that directions for location can be represented by coordinates on a grid. Form - what are maps like? Connection - How do the symbols on the map connect to real -world features and movement? In ICT we will be using Google Earth to support this. Data Handling - This will help us to interpret a lot of the information we find ourselves reading in our unit books. Understand that data can be collected, interpreted and displayed using simple graphs (Form).