Grade 4 News
An insight into life in Grade 4 at BMS...
Dear Friends of Berlin Metropolitan School,
Welcome to the latest edition of Grade 4's fortnightly newsletter.
The Grade 4 classes have been hard at work, and are now approaching the conclusion to their Unit of Inquiry, How We Express Ourselves. Sometimes the turnover of topics can seem rather rapid, but this at least adds a great deal of variety to the children's learning.
The children have also, of course, been continuing their development across a full range of subjects, and the details of some of these studies can be found in this newsletter.
Next week will be the February holidays. We'd like to wish all the Grade 4 families a safe and enjoyable time.
Grade 4 Team
Dates for your diaries:
Friday 29th January - Semester 1 Reports issued & Winter break begins
Monday 8th February - Back to School
Primary Grade 1 - 5 Three Way Parent Conferences
Wednesday, Feb. 17th, 8:30am to Thursday, Feb. 18th, 3pm
122 Linienstraße
Berlin
Dear Parents,
In order to prepare for our upcoming three way parent conferences please find the link below with directions as to how you can register for an appointment to have a conference with your child and their homeroom teacher.
http://www.signupgenius.com/tabs/23677DC06A5CFEFCF9-bmsprimary1
English Highlights
Grade 4 has explored several literary devices that good authors use. They were exposed to figurative language such as similes, personification, alliteration and metaphors in different genres. They have also discussed how authors can appeal to the reader’s senses, sense of humor and imagination by using figurative language phrases. Students have employed some of these devices in their own writing to express themselves creatively through Poetry and Narrative.
Math Highlights
With our winter break quickly approaching, 4th Grade has reached the conclusion of our data handling unit. Students explored various forms of graphing; from bar graphs and pictographs to surveys and line graphs. Students were active, reflective learners eager to make real-world data handling connections, by linking class material to their own observations and experiences. Students led discussions over the use of graphs in newspapers and the importance of surveys for successful business planning.
As always, we continue to develop our math facts fluency by diligently attacking number bonds, solving word problems and selecting strategies to solve addition, subtraction and multiplication operations.
German News
Dear Parents,
After a detailed inquiry into the Zauberlehrling and the ballad as a literary form, we directed our focus towards detecting, identifying and marking key words. Those helped us to extract the most important information from a text in order to write a good summary.
Next, we started looking at dialogues and direct speech, which is also one of the features of the ballad. The students learned about when, where and how to place speech marks in order to make speech recognizable in texts and make their writing more varied and lively.
Additionally, we have seen some excellent and very creative Zauberlehrling presentations the students have prepared for homework. Thank you for your help and support with this.
Have a relaxing winter break!
Warm regards,
Frau Pointner and Frau Lucic