YEAR 4

The term of quarantine and online learning is over! It was a tough term for everyone, getting used to the online systems and dealing with being stuck at home. Year 4’s were out of school for 11 weeks and I think they did great coping with the isolation of being at home and away from peers, I know it was challenging. Some students coped well with learning from home and participated in their online classes and kept up with most of their work, and worked hard independently and for them it has paid off.

Back at school we have caught up with each other and also reviewed and completed the units we studied at home and completed assessments.

The units we covered this term were; in English, adjectives and writing explanation texts, and continuing to work on reading comprehension skills. In Maths we covered subtraction, angles, time and area. For integrated studies it was our geography unit and we learnt about the hemispheres, we focused on the southern hemisphere learning about the countries that are in the southern hemisphere. We also researched climates and biomes and the effect that has on vegetation and wildlife. We finished the term looking at sustainability and indigenous methods of looking after the environment. For Drama students were supposed to modernize a fairy tale and then write and perform a monologue for one of their characters unfortunately many students failed to participate in this unit. But I was impressed by the effort and skill shown by those who submitted a final piece, and enjoyed watching the recorded performances. Art was adapted to make it with more limited supplies at home and I was glad to see most of our class tried each week’s work.

Students also had the option of continuing STEM at home and following the steps to make a stop motion movie. They wrote stories, selected characters (toys), learnt about storyboarding and worked using the app Stop Motion Studio. 5 students opted to complete the final movie project and should be proud of their achievement. The winner for best movie was Awwaab’s movie Saving Tobbie, he wrote and followed a script and had a detailed story in his final film. I enjoyed watching all the completed films.