Grade 4 – Term 1 Activities

Reading 

Analysing Persuasive Pieces

During this unit, students will be analysing various persuasive pieces to identify and understand how an author attempts to convince a reader. They will be determining:

  • The arguments an author provides for or against a contentious issue.
  • The reasons an author gives to justify how he/she feels about an issue.
  • The persuasive devices used by an author to help support his/her stance i.e. Alliteration, Facts, Opinions (expert), Repetition, Emotive Language, Statistics, Triples (Sensible, Reasonable, Understandable) and Imagery.

Writing 

Persuasive Writing

During this unit, students will be responding to various topics of contention via written, audio, still picture and video formats. They will have to provide reasons for or against a topic and create paragraphs with supporting justification.

Along side our reading unit of: ‘Analysing Persuasive Pieces’, students will be experimenting with the use of persuasive devices to augment their writing.

By the end of this unit, students will have chosen compose a piece of writing to persuade a reader to either: ‘Buy, Try or Imply’ a particular topic or thing.

Maths  

Time

During this unit, students will consolidate and develop their knowledge of time by exploring the following concepts;

– Calculating and converting units of time to represent in different ways (80mins = 1 hour and 20mins)
– Reading an analogue clock.
– Understanding the concept of AM and PM in reference to time
– Exploring the concept of 24 hour time
– Understanding and calculating the elapsed time between a start and finishing point.
– Using knowledge to help solve worded problems.

At the completion of the unit, students will complete their post assessment and also a transfer task that will allow them to apply their skills to a real life scenario. 

Division

During this unit, students will link their knowledge of place value to develop their understanding of the mathematical operation division. Students will develop the strategies of;

  • Recognising common and more abstract vocabulary to identify division problems
  • Partitioning numbers according to their place value to enable students to solve them more easily.
  • Using number lines to give a visual representation of their working out.
  • Working out equations using the short division strategy
  • Completing open ended tasks that will require students to use adaptive reasoning when finding their solutions.

Fractions, Decimals and Percentages

During this unit, students will be investigating how fractions, decimals and percentages are used in real life. They will cover concepts such as: 

  • Identifying and representing proper, improper and mixed numbers. 
  • Comparing fractions sizes. 
  • Finding equivalent fractions. 
  • Creating fraction sequences.
  • Add and subtracting fractions.  
  • Converting fractions to decimals and percentages.

Inquiry – Marine Life

During this unit, students will be learning about ‘Marine Life.’ Key concepts they will be exploring include: 

  • Oceans and seas  
  • Marine ecosystems
  • Marine creature adaptations  
  • Marine food chains/food webs 
  • Global Warming and its effect on Marine Life 
  • Overfishing/sustainability