Peace begins with me!

Happy new year to everyone! I hope you have all had a very restful and joyful holiday. I look forward to keeping you up-to-date concerning the Units of Inquiry that Year 4 will be covering for the rest of this academic year.

I will provide you with a weekly update, which will include a brief summary of what we have done in class plus the homework for the week. The UoI (Unit of Inquiry) homework is set on a Wednesday and we expect it in the following Tuesday.

During the last few days of last term, before Christmas, we started our new Unit of Inquiry which is called ‘Peace begins with me’. Here is some more info about it:

Unit title: Peace begins with me

Central Idea: There are many ways to resolve conflict peacefully

An Inquiry into:

1. What peace means to me

2. Peacemakers throughout history

3. Conflict resolution strategies

The children have already written some beautiful ‘Peace is...’ poems inspired by a book entitled 'The Peace Book', written by Todd Parr.

Over the holidays the children were asked to design their own ‘Peace symbol’ and write a paragraph as to why this symbol represents peace to them.

After the holiday we will be discussing and sharing our peace symbols and then we will move on to inquire into famous peacemakers throughout history. Some particular figures we will be learning about will include Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela, amongst others.

You can support your child through their inquiry by:

• regularly visiting our blog and reading the posts together with your children

• asking probing questions about the meanings of certain words or phrases

• sharing with your child what peace means to you

• helping your children to research famous peacemakers for interest at home

We are all very excited about this new unit as we have lots of fun and exciting activities planned for the next 5 weeks!

I look forward to seeing you at school on Thursday.

Until next week,

Miss Lamb

Something to think about:

"If we are going to bring about peace in the world,
we have to begin with the children."
Mahatma Gandhi