Year 4
13th March 2024
There’s a lot of reading going on in Year 4! We had a great World Book day last Thursday. We brought in our teddies, shared our favourite books and we also visited Year 1 and read to the younger children, which everyone really enjoyed. Some children brought in books to swap with others in Year 3 and 4, so they were able to take a ‘new’ book home. We made book marks which the children have put in their reading books and joined the BBC live lesson in the morning, where they talked about different genres and recommended books.
Year 4 are really enjoying reading the first book in the Spiderwick series. It’s really making them think and we’re having great discussions about the mystery in the story and who might be responsible. The children loved the extract from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that we read last half term as a whole class reading text. So we have just started this as our class reader and we’re looking forward to reading about the adventures as the children go through the wardrobe into Narnia.
Other News
Year 4 are currently working really hard with Year 5 on their performance of The Gospel Show. We’re looking forward to sharing the show with parents in the last week of term.
English
In Year 4 we continue to develop our writing skills. The children really enjoyed writing their version of The British poem by Benjamin Zephaniah. We discussed what makes us the Year 4 class – from the places their families come from or where they live, to the ingredients that make a good Y4 person, like honesty, resilience or hard work.
Here’s an extract from our shared writing:
Year 4
Serves 23.
Take some Italians, Russians, Irish and Portuguese
And people from Skegness
Then whisk in some Turkish and Caribbean
Add some Spanish and Polish and South Africans,
Mix together well then stir vigorously.
Mix in some London and Ware
Then take a blend of excellent listening
And a handful of quiet
Combine with a cupful of courage and a pinch of concentration
And chop it into pairs.
Sprinkle some kindness and love,
Then add to the melting pot.
Other News
We are also very excited to be starting rehearsals for our Y4/5 Easter performance this half term!
In maths we have been exploring lines of symmetry in regular and irregular shapes and recapping our knowledge of the properties of shape.
Maths
In maths we have been learning all about units of measure and how to convert them. The children particularly enjoyed exploring mass, capacity and length in a practical lesson and estimating, then measuring, different objects from around the classroom and school.
South America
We have started our South America topic and the children have already come in with some extra interesting facts to share from their research at home. We have explored the countries that make up the continent and the children now know the difference between physical and human features, as they proved with a sorting activity of various locations from around South America.
Descriptive Writing
In Year 4, we have been really busy developing our descriptive writing. The children have learnt to use techniques such as the Rule of 3 and 'show don't tell' to develop their writing skills. The children really enjoyed using the 'Taking Flight' clip from Literacy Shed as a stimulus for their writing. We are now 'reading as writers' and 'writing as readers' to further develop our skills in writing story settings. They have also really enjoyed reading an extract from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in our reading sessions. We think we need to read the whole book as a class reader now!
We are Software Developers
In computing, we have been using a web-based program called Scratch. We have had lots of fun developing our coding skills. We have designed and evaluated our own computer games. It has taken a lot of perseverance and problem solving.
Subtraction with regrouping
In maths, we have been developing our mental maths skills and mental fluency. We have then used these skills when learning about formal written addition and subtraction. We set ourselves a challenge of using digit cards (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4) to see how many subtraction calculations we could create (4-digit minus 4-digit), where only the thousands regroup. It made our brains hurt but we stuck with it and we go there!
Narrative writing
In English, we have been developing our writing skills, particularly focusing upon sentence structure, prepositional phrases and dialogue. We have been drawing inspiration from the text ‘Leon and The Place Between’ by Grahame Baker-Smith. As part of the unit, we created freeze frames of our favourite pages and explained our choices to the class. We have published some amazing writing about travelling through the box to the place between.
Changes of State
In science, we have been learning about changes of state. We can identify solids, liquids and gases. We can also explain the process of changing from one state to another. As part of this unit, we have been exploring the Water Cycle, including learning a song. For our homework, we continued to develop our understanding by explaining the processes of evaporation, condensation and perspiration to an adult. Some of us make diagrams or even a model.
