With the sun smiling at last, we have enjoyed a fun and varied week to end the term.

In RE we learnt about the significance of the story of Ram and Sita in the Hindu celebration of Diwali – ‘The Festival of Light’. The practice of lighting diva candles to mark the triumph of good over evil brought about some good discussion of the significance of light within different cultures. Children enjoyed creating their own colourful Rangoli patterns that are used to attract the Goddess Lakshmi into homes.

Following on from the brilliant BAE systems assembly, children have worked in small groups to create and advertise their own incredible robot designs in English. We had a great range of ideas from ‘Helpers at Home’ to ‘Robo Pilots’, all with ingenious features. The children did really well presenting their ideas to the class, engaging their audience with actions and intonation.

Maths this week has focused on developing children’s written methods for multiplication and division. Using practical resources and pictures, pupils have learnt the bus-stop method for short division and used this to investigate rules for divisibility. These rules state that a number will divide exactly by 3 if its digits add up to a multiple of 3. E.g. 66 will divide by 3 as 6+6=12, and 12 is a multiple of 3. Similarly, 234 will divide by 3 as 2+3+4 = 9 and 9 is a multiple of 3. Did you know that a number will divide by 9 if its digits add to 9? Maybe children could use their skills to prove this is true over the half-term holiday?

Have a wonderful, sunny and safe half-term. We look forward to seeing you back in school on Monday 5th June.

The Year 4 Team

This week in RE we have been continuing to look at eternal life, inspired by the resurrection of Jesus. We have considered and discussed some key Catholic teachings around this, including how to get to Heaven.

In Maths, we have learnt about the commutative law (how changing the position of numbers in a multiplication number sentence does not change the product). We have used this to find the most efficient ways of solving multiplication problems involving three numbers. We finished the week by using our multiplication skills to scale up recipes – so if you need help cooking for a dinner party, ask your child!

Following an amazingly inspiring visit from BAE Systems last week, where they shared with us some very clever technology, this week in English, we have been creating our own robots. We have explored what makes an advert successful, and have been planning to advertise our own robot creations, which we will continue with next week.

We wish you a wonderful weekend, and look forward to seeing you. On Thursday, we are having a Science day exploring materials, their properties and how they change.

Team 4 🙂

… Year 4 have been learning lots about the Saxon brothers, Hengest and Horsa in our topic and guided reading.

In RE, we continue to study Heaven; what the Bible tells us about it and what it looks like to us individually.

In English we’ve been working hard to add fronted adverbials into our work (phrases that give the reader a bit more information about where, when or how something happened). The driver for this was a short clip from the Nike advert featuring Ronaldo which lots of the children loved.

In Maths we have continued looking at shape and coordinates and will be moving on to multiplication and division next week.

In spellings this week we have been learning the rule for turning a verb ending in -d or -de into a noun by adding -sion:

explosion, division, collision, corrosion, conclusion, extension, comprehension, evasion, intrusion.

We wish you all a pleasant weekend! See you Monday,

Mrs Atkins, Mr Pratley and Miss Hill 🙂