Next Week in Grade 4...

Tuesday September 27th- Library Day

Important Dates

*Environmental Art - We are starting an environmental art project to put on our bulletin board. One of the
important parts of the job of a nature conservationist is to do public service announcements. We will be making
a bulletin board full of environmental art to educate our school about the importance of conserving water and
not polluting. So, if you have any bottle caps or plastic lids of any kind, it would be much appreciated if you
would send that to school. Thank you in advance :)
Literacy & Science
This week we are starting our discipline-based inquiry into being nature conservationists. The purpose of
discipline-based inquiry is to get students engaged in real global and local issues and to understand how to have
a true impact on them by taking on the role of a profession. In this method, students learn the accurate
information, vocabulary, processes and skills that a particular person would need in order to be effective in
that job. Your child will learn about all of these things as they pertain to being a nature conservationist. To
start with, your child will be engaged in centers where they will explore materials to spark their curiosity and
thinking about 5 key questions that nature conservationists talk about and study:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

why do we need water?

where do we get water?
how much water does the earth have available?
how much water does it take to make _______ (cotton t-shirts, fruits, meat etc.)
is it easy to reverse pollution?

Over the next few months students will learn how to be a junior nature conservationist and how they can
positively impact and contribute to their local community. This week students will also learn about the
difference between fact and opinion and they will analyze the different between a level 1 and level 4
persuasive writing piece.
Mathematics
Starting on Monday students will begin their morning with an open-ended math word problem. Students will be
encouraged to find multiple ways to solve the problem and share their ideas with their family and classmates. I
will also send home a word problem for your family to solve every week. I will put this on the class website
under homework.
In relationship to being a nature conservationist, this week students will be learning about multiplication. They
will be doing an experiment at school to see how much water a leaky tap creates for 30 minutes. Then, we will
multiply that by 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and then 1 year to see how much water is wasted. Students will
then write an opinion piece about what they would do with that 1 year of wasted water.
Health & Life Skills
This week students will discuss where their drinking water comes from. We will review the water cycle and
then talk about the impact cutting trees has on our rain and how our rain impacts our food. We will also discuss
how much of our body is made up of water how much water we should be drinking in a day in order to stay
hydrated and healthy!

Week of November 24th

Important Dates

Tuesday November 25th- Library Day & Play Buddies!

Wednesday November 26th- A visit from Andrea Beck (www.andreabeck.com).
Wednesday December 17th- Kindergarten Christmas Concert. It starts at 1:10pm. Parents
are welcome to come and enjoy some crafts and refreshments at school!
*The Christmas Toy Drive is starting to support families during the holidays. If you have
any gift donations for children _______ please send them in. It would be greatly
appreciated.
*If your child is in SK, please return the last page of the report card as soon as possible.

Language
Poem of the week: Hickory Dickory Dock
Your childs focus for the week: ____________
We are exploring rhyming words and finishing our unit on retelling events. For students final
task they will be retelling Hickory Dickory Dock with puppets and making up their own
ending with a new character.

Mathematics
We are continuing to learn different ways to sort items and exploring a variety of simple
patterns (AABB, ABAB, ABC).

Science & Technology

Students are becoming experts at identifying different structures and what they are made
of. Now we will be learning about who builds structures and exploring how to make blueprints
for our own structures.

The Arts
We had a big box donated to our classroom, so we will be brainstorming different ways to
use it to transform our dramatic play center into something fun and festive for December.
We will become the most creative architects and construction workers ever!
*To help us put together our dramatic play center and for holiday crafts as well, we would
greatly appreciate any donations of recyclable materials (especially toilet paper rolls,
Kleenex boxes, paper towel rolls etc.). ThankArts
you so much!!!
Over the next couple of week students will begin to collect some plastic items from our school. We will sort
them throughout the week and do research about different types of environmental art. We will use the plastic
we get from our school bins and home (if you have some!) to make environmental art. We especially need
bottle caps.

Next Week in Grade 4...