Next Week in Grade 4...

Important Dates
Tuesday September 27th- Library Day
*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. why do we need water?
2. where do we get water?
3. how much water does the earth have available?
4. how much water does it take to make _______ (cotton t-shirts, fruits, meat etc.)
5. 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!

Arts
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.