Year 4

Creativity, zest, teamwork and love of learning are the key character strengths we learned in Year 4. We learned to be brave like Nim from Nim’s Island and creative like Roald Dahl. We used deductive reasoning like Detective ‘Shelby’ Holmes from The Great Shelby Holmes: Girl Detective and finally, we learned humility like Hugo from The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Really, we have been stepping into books and learning from the characters we have studied all year.

Term 1 took us on an adventure into the novel Nim’s Island by Wendy Orr. We learned about Nim and her character strengths of bravery, resilience and independence. We used these character strengths at camp by showing courage when rock climbing, resilience on the 2.4km Charles Darwin walk, and independence when we made durable nests and homes for all types of Australian animals. Overall, camp was an enjoyable and new experience for all of us. Our ‘survival skills’ were also put to the test on our excursion to Watsons Bay where we studied the animals and plants, then figured out how they added value to our environment.

In Term 2, we unpacked linguistic tools, as we studied The BFG by Roald Dahl. We learned about spoonerisms, made by swapping sounds at the start of two words, for example ‘skipping and jumping’ becomes ‘jipping and skumping’, portmanteau and alliteration. We used these tools to help us understand the language of the BFG, invented by Roald Dahl called ‘Gobblefunk’. We learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which helps with pronunciation, and used this along with our

THRASS chart when spelling and sounding out difficult words. We used creativity to make up our own words and thought about the history of where they came from. Did you know that peri means around and meter means to measure, so perimeter means to measure all the way around the outside?

We channelled our inner detective in Term 3 when studying the mysterious book, The Great Shelby Holmes: Girl Detective by Elizabeth Eulberg, about a dognapper. We used our deductive reasoning in Studio Learning to categorise rocks into igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic. This came in handy at Bondi Beach when we learned about history and honeycomb weathering with Professor Thom.

Pictures are more powerful than we think. In Term 4 we read The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, which has 284 drawings in it, and learned about visual literacy devices such as vectors, gaze, dominance and juxtaposition. Everyone did a speech on an advertisement of their choice and had to unpack it using visual literacy terms.

Year 4 was like a learning train – when you jump on, you can be a successful and independent learner. However, we all realised through humility and teamwork that not one person can power this on their own. It takes everyone’s strength to power our learning train. It’s not our final destination that counts, it’s the journey. With our teachers and our friends by our side, what a wonderful journey it has been!