Book Sharing Assembly

Over the past two months, we explored the genre of narratives during writers' workshop. 

We learned to use various strategies during the different stages of the writing process (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and publishing) to improve the quality of our work. We especially worked hard on describing our characters, settings, and actions in order to help paint a picture in the readers' heads. 

During our last assembly, we finally had the opportunity to share our published work with our friends, families, and the rest of the school community!

We were all so proud of how far we had come as authors!

Click on the pictures of the books to read them online!

 

We hope you enjoyed reading the books!

Please feel free to take a look at the books in the library!

Boat Trip!

Last week, we took off on our second unit with the central idea "People share their responsibilities in communities through offering goods and services in marketplaces."

As a part of "tuning in", we went on a sea bus to tour the Kobe port area in order to notice and discuss the different things and places which make our city attractive to tourists and the people who live here. 

It was so exciting to see the different parts of the port area. 

Here are some pictures of what we saw!

Once we got off the boat, we had some time to hang out in the sun. 

Some of us took this opportunity to climb some trees!

Others relaxed and engaged in some spontaneous crafting using natural objects like twigs and stones. 

What a cool group of kids!!!

Revising our Writing

In Grade 4, a major goal for all of us is to learn to independently work through the writing process with various genres. Our first genre in focus has been narratives. 

The writing process involves the following five parts: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and publishing. 

Over the past two months, we have been exploring various strategies that work for us to write independently. As writers, we need to think about the next steps which should be taken in order to improve our work. We make these important decisions by reflecting on our writing and conferring with the teacher. 

Last month, we worked very hard on revising our drafts in order to improve our writing. For example, we learned to develop our characters and describe settings by carefully considering our choices of words. 

Our final step in the revision process was to "take scissors to our drafts", meaning that we cut photocopied versions of our drafts apart into chunks to reorganize our writing so that it all makes sense. 

We needed to reread our entire pieces to make sure our narrative pieces flowed effectively. 

We considered how to make our work enjoyable as well as easy to understand for our target audience. 

Some of our pieces ended up becoming so long that they probably should be divided into chapters!

Take a look!

In November, we will be working on editing and publishing our writing for other people to enjoy.

Stay tuned 😄

Totem Poles

Last week, our first unit with the following central idea came to an end: 

our beliefs and values help impact the choices we make. 

As a way to explore and express our own beliefs and values, 

we worked on a project of designing 3D art which is inspired by totem poles!

Totem poles are an important part of the culture of First Nation people on the Western coast of North America. Totem poles serve many purposes such as representing stories or important events as well as celebrating cultural beliefs. 

In this project, we first came up with various qualities that we value. 

For example, some of us chose honesty, wisdom and bravery as qualities which are important to us. 

We then thought of animals which we believe to represent such qualities.

Next, we used Lego blocks to construct rectangular prisms. 

Then, we used these 3D shapes to create nets for each animal to put on our totem poles. This was a challenging process since we needed to picture how 2D shapes make up the sides of a 3D shape!

Once our nets were completed, we drew our chosen animals from various perspectives. 

It was important to think about how different shapes would look like when they were seen from the front, top, left, right, and behind. 

Here are some of the finished totem poles!

See you next week :)

Field Trip to the Suma Aquarium!

Last Friday, Grades 1 to 6 went on a field trip to the Suma Aquarium! 

We spent the day learning about marine creatures!

Here are some pictures of what we saw. 

We also stumbled upon some penguins!

What a fun-filled day we had!

See you later alligator! 

Investigating Ancient Numbers

In math, we have been looking at the following big idea:

We applied our growing knowledge of the place value of numbers in order to crack the code below!

We found out that before people started using modern numerals, the ancient Egyptians had a unique number system. This system was based on various symbols representing various values such as ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, and millions. 

Once we understood the meaning behind these symbols, we created our very own number systems!

Come take a look at the bulletin board on the first floor!