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 😄