Welcome back!

We hope you all had an enjoyable holiday and are ready for a busy and fun year
ahead. Your children have settled back into school beautifully and are already working hard! We are loving getting to know them.

Maths
This term in Maths, some of the areas the students will be working on are Number, Place Value and Data Representation/Graphing. We will be spending a lot of time developing our place value skills with different tasks, games and small projects covering numbers up to and beyond 10,000! Daily times tables practice will also be a focus both at school and at home to help students build their number fluency. In Grade 4, we support hands-on learning where students collaborate with one another. This will entail many maths games and open-ended tasks where students will challenge their own abilities.

Writing

This term we will continue to implement the Writer’s Workshop model in our classrooms. Our goal is to follow an independent routine where students can practice writing genres that have been modelled and taught to them. Students will follow the routine of selecting a seed that makes them think. Unpacking a seed and shaping it into thinking in their individual Writer’s Seed Notebook, composing, conferencing, revising and editing their writing. Students then begin the process again on a new genre or style of writing.

This term is about setting up routines, building writing stamina, understanding processes and expectations and problem-solving issues that may arise.

Spelling

This year in spelling students will investigate words to assist them to become metacognitive, strategic spellers. Students will be involved in three, twenty- minute sessions a week to purposefully investigate words through three different lenses - what words look like (visual), what words sound like (phonemic) and the meaning of words (etymology). We are looking at spelling generalisations.

Reading

This term we will begin with finding Good Fit Books and Voracious Reading, setting students up with high expectations for the rest of the year. ‘Good Fit

Books’ are those that are:

• Of high interest. Books are chosen by the student as we want them to be engaged in and develop a love for reading; becoming keen, voracious readers.
• Not too easy and not too hard, but just right. It is important that there are some challenging words in the texts students read to increase their vocabulary but not too many so that they lose their comprehension of the text.
• Comprehended by students. They understand what is happening in a text to gain meaning from what they are reading.

Students will have their own book box in class. In this box they will have a good fit book, a picture story book, a challenging book and texts such as comics and magazines. We will be using quality literature as a focus point this term to walk the students through many comprehension strategies such as visualising, making connections, comparing and contrasting, predicting and summarising.

Integrated Studies - Headspace Heroes

The focus this term is developing strategies to better understand and improve our mental health. Students will explore their emotions and develop strategies that they can add to their mental health tool boxes. This learning will be supported by an incursion by Let’s Grow where students will collaborate, explore their strengths, and cultivate a positive classroom culture. Through hands-on activities, they’ll design, construct, and nurture their own terrariums—each layer representing key values like teamwork, respect, and responsibility that help their community grow. They will explore their emotional wellbeing, relationships, and the role of community in mental health.

Camp

A highlight this year is our CAMP! We will all be attending CYC ADANAC in Yarra

Junction. The Grade 4s will attend camp from Monday 23rd – Wednesday 25th November. More information regarding camp will be sent home shortly.

Homework

The students will be given homework once a week beginning in week two. Homework this term will consist of home reading, practising times tables and choosing an activity each week from the Health Grid. Homework will be given out on a Tuesday and returned to school by the following Monday.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact your child’s teacher.

We look forward to a terrific year!

Kind regards,

Amy Hillier, Beth Stephens, Bec Dell and Claire Saliba.

TERM 1 SPECIALIST TIMETABLE

Term 1 Newsletter