🌏 Year 4 Excursion: Discovering Australia’s Immigration Stories! 🇦🇺

As part of our exciting CBL unit "Discovery", the Year 4 students have been diving into what makes Australia such a unique and diverse country. To bring our learning to life, we recently went on an unforgettable excursion to the Immigration Museum—and also made a stop at Sandridge Bridge in Melbourne!

At the Immigration Museum, we stepped into the shoes of real immigrants and discovered powerful personal stories from people who moved to Australia over the last 230 years. Through hands-on exhibits, we explored the journeys, challenges, and triumphs of people who made Australia their new home.

🏀⚽ Year 4 Sport: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work! 🤝🏃

This term in Year 4 Sport, we've been focusing on a skill that’s just as important as running fast or scoring goals—teamwork! 💪

Every week, our activities have been all about working together, communicating clearly, and supporting one another. From high-energy games to creative team challenges, our students have shown what it really means to be part of a team.

Personal & Social

🧠 Building Resilience Through Team Challenges

The last few weeks, students worked on showing resilience – the ability to keep trying, even when something feels difficult. This links to our learning goal of recognising when we’re in the “learning pit” and using strategies to climb out of it.

As part of this, we focused on our school value of achievement by working together in small groups to complete a fun but tricky activities. One of these activities was the cup stacking challenge. This involved Cup Stacking with string and rubber bands – no hands allowed!

It was great to see students:

• Working collaboratively to solve problems

• Including everyone in their team

• Trying again and again when things didn’t go to plan
  
  

Activities like this help build both teamwork and perseverance, and we were so proud of the way students supported one another through the challenge.

LITERACY

In Reading the last few weeks we have been focusing on:

🔍 Synthesising (week 7)
Your child is learning to combine ideas from different parts of a text (or from more than one text) with their own thinking. This helps them form new understandings and make deeper sense of what they read.

🛠 Purpose of Procedural Texts  (week 8)
From recipes to instructions, procedural texts are a big part of everyday reading. Students are learning how these texts are structured to clearly explain steps—and why following the order is important.

🗣 Author’s Choice of Language (week 8)
We’re encouraging students to think about the words authors use. What mood do they create? Why did the author describe something in a certain way? These questions help students become more thoughtful readers and writers.

🔗 Cause and Effect  (week 9)
Understanding how one event leads to another is a key skill. Whether it's a character's decision or a natural event in a nonfiction text, recognising cause and effect helps students connect the dots.

🤝 Making Connections (Text-to-Self and Text-to-Text) (week 10)
Students are encouraged to connect what they read to their own experiences and to other texts they've read. These connections help bring meaning to reading and make it more relatable and engaging.

🌿 Celebrating NAIDOC Week (week 11)
As we explore texts, we’re also taking time to celebrate NAIDOC Week, a special time to honour and learn about the history, culture, and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Through stories, discussions, and activities, students are developing respect and understanding of the world’s oldest living cultures. This is a great opportunity to talk at home about the importance of First Nations perspectives and voices in the stories we read and share.

In Writing the last few weeks we have been working on: 

In Weeks 8-11 students have been hard at work learning how to write procedural texts—the kind of writing that teaches someone how to do something. From “How to Make a Paper Plane” to “How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse” (yes, really!), students have been discovering just how important clear, detailed instructions are.

We’ve followed the full writing process to plan, draft, edit, and publish our own “how-to” pieces. Here’s a peek at what we’ve been working on:

✏️ Planning – Students began by thinking carefully about a task they know well. They brainstormed the materials needed and listed each step in a logical order.

📄 Drafting – With their plan in hand, students started writing their procedures using strong action verbs and time connectives like first, next, then, and finally.

🔍 Revising and Editing – After drafting, students reread their texts with fresh eyes. They looked for missing steps, added more detail, and fixed up spelling and punctuation to make sure their writing was easy to follow.

📢 Publishing and Sharing – Finally, we published our procedure texts and shared them with the class. 

We also included a fun activity called Round Robin Writing Fun! – To boost creativity and teamwork, we did a special collaborative writing activity. In small groups, students started writing the beginning of a procedural text. Every 5 minutes, they swapped papers with another group and continued writing from where the last group left off! It was a fun challenge to jump into someone else’s instructions—and keep them clear and consistent. There were plenty of laughs, surprises, and some very imaginative procedures by the end!

NUMERACY

CBL

This term, Year 4 students explored the challenge: What has been the impact of colonisation on different groups of people?

As part of our CBL (Challenge-Based Learning) unit, students investigated the effects of colonisation on First Nations peoples, settlers, and others. To show their understanding, they created a presentation, poster, or physical model.

We were so impressed by the thoughtful and creative work students produced. Their projects showed a growing understanding of history and empathy for different perspectives.

Well done, Year 4!

3 WAY CONFERENCES

🎤 Getting Ready for Our 3-Way Conferences!

We’ve been busy preparing to share our learning at our 3-way conferences. Students have taken time to reflect on their progress and carefully choose work they’re proud of. To build confidence, we even practiced presenting in front of the class before the big day on Thursday!

We can’t wait for you to see just how much we’ve grown—academically and personally. It’s a great opportunity for students to take the lead and celebrate their own learning journey!