Units of Inquiry

Our first unit of inquiry of the year centred on the concept of responsibility, as we inquired into the central idea: Decision-making processes exist within organisations. The students reflected on the different roles they can take on in our learning community, and we established processes and developed classroom agreements to ensure our learning community is a place where all feel welcome, safe and able to learn.

This unit really took off when Mr Kenner and Mr Clapham offered the students the opportunity to share in the decision making around the expenditure of classroom budgets. Each class had their own vigorous debates about the best way to spend $200, with students passionately advocating for an incredibly broad range of purchases.

These authentic opportunities for decision-making enabled the students to explore how different processes for decision making may work; with each class eventually coming to a consensus about how best to spend the money. The Year 3s even decided to donate some of their money to help support the Year 4 initiative to start a charitable business. We were mighty impressed with our learning community's principled approach to this process.

To launch our second unit of inquiry, Where We Are In Place and Time, we visited the amazing Cranbourne Botanical Gardens. Our guides took us on an inspiring adventure as we learned about biomimicry, using nature as inspiration for design. This was a perfect provocation to begin thinking about our unit, which centres on the idea that technology has changed the way people live their lives.

Numeracy

Problem-solving, mental computation and the authentic use of mathematical concepts such as timelines have been interwoven throughout our program in Term 1. The number relationship between Place Value columns has been a key early focus and is a great lead-in to Addition and Subtraction. Our measurement unit around time has been a wonderful learning journey for students and has provided some great opportunities for Teacher Jokes. We have made some great discoveries about how to read analogue clocks, calculate the time until events and developed a better understating of the way minutes, hours and days work. We also noticed that 6:30 is the best time, hands down.

Language

A significant part of our English language learning occurs through our program of inquiry, as students learn through language, using language as a tool to think, listen, discuss and reflect on information, issues and ideas. For example, the students collaborated across year levels on a team research project as part of their current unit of inquiry. The students were challenged to examine a technological innovation and research how it has changed over time. Key to their investigations was looking behind changes and discovering the reasons for the innovations. This project gave students the opportunity to deepen their conceptual understanding and also develop research skills (finding multiple reliable sources), multimedia skills (by utilising technology to both record and present information) and social skills (finding ways to support others to succeed). Our unit will continue with an individual investigation during the first three weeks of Term 2.

We hope you enjoy a relaxing and safe school holiday.

JAMES CLAPHAM, CRAIG KENNER & BRONWYN BURROWS
Year 3/4 Learning Community