After two weeks of settling into new classes, learning new routines and setting the groundwork for a brilliant year ahead, Year 4 has been full steam ahead, learning across many curriculum areas. But rather than have a teacher’s blurb about all the official “stuff” we are exploring in class, we will hand it over to the students to voice their thoughts and opinions on what they are enjoying about their learning in Year 4, using quotes from our student survey.

In Maths we've learnt:

“Measurement… and how to spell it.”

“100 cm makes one metre and we estimated how long a metre was pretty accurately (within 10 centimetres).”

“My foot is 24cm long but my shoe is 26 cm. And your foot is about the same length as the distance between the crook of your elbow and your wrist!”

“One thousand metres is in a kilometre.”

"We used a trundle wheel to find out how far it is to the canteen and back from our room. It's about 157m each way."

And in Place Value…

“I had forgotten about place value, but was reminded I can make and say numbers up to the ten-thousands. And we learnt that there's HEAPS of other values beyond ten-thousand.”

“I was reminded that, when we're looking at place value, you need to start on the right.”

“I've discovered that adding things in columns (using the vertical algorithm) to solve addition problems is much easier than the other strategies, for me.”

In Reader's Workshop:

“We have practised the strategy of connecting text to self, text to text and text to the world.”

“We are reading The Boy at the Back of the class and they like Lemon Sherbets. I like them too."

"We ate a Lemon Sherbet because it kept coming up in the book and we learned what they were and how delicious they were. We made a mindmap to describe them.”

"I'd never had a Lemon Sherbet before (I'd is a contraction - we're doing them in spelling). Now that I know what they are I understand the story better and have made text-to-self connections."

“I've been reminded how much I love just sitting and reading.”

“I've found lots of new words when I've been reading.”

“It's important to be quiet (which is showing respect) when you read so other people can focus.”

“Punctuation is important. It helps you know how to read something and have more expression when you read.”

“I know what three dots (...) is now. It's an ellipsis and it's used when a character doesn't finish a sentence or the author wants to build suspense.”

In Science:

“We are learning about materials.”

“We investigated different gloves to try and work out what material they were made of and what they would be used for.”

“I saw what a Hungry Jack's glove is made of. It's really bumpy, which I wasn't expecting. I think it's like that to help you hold onto things and not drop them.”

“We are learning about the properties of materials and what makes them good for the thing you use them for.”

“It's important to do a fair test in Science when you're trying to work things out.”

“The things you change in Science are called 'variables' and you only change one thing at a time.”

We also love:

Personal Projects

“Personal Projects are fun because we get to learn about things that interest us. I am gonna learn the saxophone.”

“I'm learning about photography in Personal Projects.”

“Some of us are trying to solve a Rubik's Cube. There's already someone in our class who can do it really fast!”

“I'm inventing new things. I'm not sure what it's going to be yet.”

PE

“We do it (PE) every morning and play games like Softies and Soccer and Golden Child and Link Tag.”

“Doing PE in the morning is fun and you get to run before you sit down to work.”

“We need a lot of exercise and Cricket Clapper Slap was amazing!”

“In PE we're learning Oz-tag and new skills with the specialists (teachers)."

With Books and Buddies:

“We visit the library each week and get new books for our book boxes. Then we spend time (learning) with our little Buddies. They're cute.”

In Japanese: 

“We wrote our Japanese names with the calligraphy brushes.”

“We wrote learning goals on Ema then put them on the gold tree” 

“We learnt that students our age in Japan get to ride unicycles. They all eat the same tasty lunch and get to watch TV while they eat.”

“We started the karate belts system and tried to remember all of our hiragana to get to black belt.” 

In Art:

“We created water-colour animals with Raina.”

In Writing:

"Persuasive arguments are about convincing something about what your opinion is."

"I had some good reasons why we should have free fruit at school."

"Disagreement doesn't mean disrespect. We are learning how to have a debate and attack the point, not the person."

And so much more!

“We learnt that being frustrated was in the yellow zone.”

“I can sign the Zones colours in Auslan.”

“One Good thing is something we do at the end of the day. We write one good thing that we learnt or that happened to us that day. There's always one good thing in every day.”

“I'm excited about being on the SRC.”