Hello,

We hope that you are having a good week so far and that the children are enjoying the first day of their February half term break.

This week, Year 4 have been learning about how to use a variety of conjunctions and key facts to inform a reader. In particular, we have been learning how to use co-ordinating, subordinating and causal conjunctions – these skills have been practised through the use of debates and ‘conscience alley’, whereby the children used their climate change sentences to persuade a friend to purchase an electric car instead of a diesel super car. As the week progressed, we then considered how relative clauses could also be used to add further information e.g. statistics, percentages and other facts. We were delighted with the range of informative sentences that were created by Year 4, regarding Global Warming, Deforestation, Fossil Fuels and Plastics in the Sea. Well done everyone!

In Maths, we have been working on using a range of different strategies in order to calculate fractions of an amount. This has enabled the children to complete a variety of comparison questions (e.g. ‘Which is more and which is less, 2/3 of 36 sweets or 3/5 of 25 sweets?’) and place value tasks (e.g. ‘If I know 2/4 of 12, I can calculate 2/4 of 120 by multiplying my answer by 10, as 120 is ten times bigger than 12 and the fraction of the amount is the same’). We were very impressed by the children’s use of reasoning skills when selecting their strategies for solving, which included: bar models, trial/error, arrays, partitioning (part-part whole), number lines and even ’10 times bigger or smaller’. Both classes had demonstrated true resilience across these challenge tasks, taking care to ensure their presentation was neat and their selection of strategy was appropriate.

Last week, we had a fantastic time during our STEM day. Year Four worked in groups to create their very own terrarium-style animal habitat. Each team thought very carefully about how they could show a cross section of their habitat, which was carefully designed to ensure their chosen creature could survive. Please take a look at the photos of our work, below:

We hope that you all have a great break and we look forward to seeing you all after the holidays.

Best wishes,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns

Hello everyone,

We hope you have had a fantastic week and enjoying the slightly brighter mornings!

This week, the children have been working extremely hard in Maths focusing on solving problems with increasingly harder fractions. Revisiting Fractions this term gave children the opportunity to show off all of their strategies and different ways to represent these fractions. These included bar models, numberlines, arrays and many more. Next week, we are going to continue to solve problems but with a clearer focus on word and multistep to really challenge year 4.

In English, we started a new unit with a letter from Greta Thunberg. It was amazing to see the reaction of Koalas and Kangaroos and how passionate they are about looking after the Earth and God’s creations. Throughout the next couple of weeks, the children are going to gather facts about our environments, go on a local study around the school to see the threats on habitats in order for them to write a persuasive letter to inform the world on how we can save our environment and the importance of acting now!

Tomorrow, Friday 7th is STEM day and we are all really excited to create our own Biomes. Children all week have been bringing in resources and coming up with ideas that they want to do for their micro habitats. A quick thanks for all the resources the children have brought in already, and thankyou for any future resources!

Some reminders for next week ;

Friday 7th February – Stem Day

Wednesday 12th February – Classroom Poetry Competition – Kids, get your props ready!

Thursday 13th February – Last day of half term!

Friday 14th February – Inset Day

Monday 24th February – First day back of Spring 2.

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Miss Jackson-Nash, Miss Honeywell and Mrs Cairns