Happy Friday everyone, we wish you a wonderful weekend! Just to summarise what we’ve been up to this week in Year 4…

In English we have been writing newspaper reports about the ‘Iron Man Attack’ at Northney Farm, Hayling Island. We have been using language to engage the reader, subordinate clauses to add extra information, a range of sentence openers and speech punctuation to add quotes from eye-witnesses. Some of the best published versions will be shown at the Northney Farm Tea Rooms!

In Maths we have really enjoyed manipulating numbers using our knowledge of multiplication and division. We have doubled and halved numbers and multiplied and divided them by 10 and 100. We have looked at number sentences and used the inverse to find new facts – the connections between numbers that children have found are truly amazing! On Friday we launched our new Maths homework platform, SumDog, which replaces MyMaths and Abacus. Your child should have their username and log in in their bag so that they can log on to the website from anywhere to enjoy an endless stream of maths games. All activities are automatically differentiated and are progressive.

In RE we have started our unit on Prayers, Saints and Feasts by looking at the story of Mary and Martha, thinking about the message that Jesus gave. Being October and a month of Mary, we also have studied the Magnificat and found out some very interesting things about the Mother of God.

As it gets colder, please remember to pack a pair of tracksuit bottoms and hooded top in your child’s PE kit and ensure that they always have their kit in school on a Wednesday and a Friday, if not at all times. Thank you.

Team 4 🙂

This week has ended with a colourful bang, dressing up today to raise money for CAFOD.

In Maths this week we have been adding and subtracting, both mentally and using the expanded column written method. We have continued to work hard to use our reasoning to explain our thinking, including using concrete resources and drawing them pictorially into our books.

In English we have had a creative week working in groups in the role of villagers from the story, to generate ideas to destroy the Iron Man once and for all. We then came up with an argument, and debated this at a Town Meeting with the Mayor. Today wrote up our arguments, reinforcing our beliefs.

In RE, we have looked at what the Bible tells us about Harvest and created PowerPoints to explain our findings. We learned that we should share what we have with others who have less than us and that we should respect God’s creation so that we can all benefit from it.

The spellings for this week have been chosen by the children themselves. They should all have a copy of the Year 3/4 spelling list which they have highlighted with 5-6 spellings of their choice. These should be words that they don’t already know.

Have a lovely weekend,

Team 4

This week in Maths lessons we’ve been looking at: making confident estimates to problems through rounding, numbers below zero and consolidating our place value knowledge through open-ended activities.

In Literacy, we have been looking closely at using inverted commas to identify directed speech within a text. The children have begun writing their own direct speech for characters from The Iron Man text, ready to include in their newspaper articles.

A huge ‘thank you’ to the children for bringing in some amazing pieces of homework, ranging from created robots too powerpoints and posters!

For homework the children have these spellings to practice (remember to develop a clear understanding of what they mean – you could do this by using them correctly in a sentence):

Mane, main, peace, piece, fare, fair.

As the weather is starting to get colder, please can children remember to bring in their jumpers and coats.

Have a lovely weekend,

The Year 4 Team!

This week we have been continuing to look at Place Value, in particular looking at representing numbers in different ways and placing them on number lines.

In English, we are continuing to immerse ourselves in The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, in particular looking at powerful language and creating interesting sentences by varying the sentence opener.

In RE we looked at the story of Joseph and the Technicolour Dream Coat and thought about the message that we should respect all of God’s creations as He made us all.

In PE this week we have been continuing with our robot dances in groups, imagining that we are part of a production line making cars.

In Computing we made Robot Emotion Machines and wrote code for simulating different emotional responses from our robots.

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to practice our spellings ending in -ure:

-Treasure

-Pleasure

-Measure

-Closure

-Enclosure

Team 4 🙂

We hope you’ve all had a wonderful summer and we welcome our new Kangaroos and Koalas warmly to the new school year!

We’re hitting the ground running in Year 4, kicking off the year with our topic ‘Rise of the Robots’. This topic links English (we’ve begun reading The Iron Man by Ted Hughes), Science (where we’ve been exploring how to make a bulb light in a circuit) and PE (creating dances where we move like robots). Later in the half-term we’ll also be looking at programming in ICT and mechanical systems in DT.

In maths this week we have been ensuring that we fully understand place value up to 10,000. We have been finding one thousand more and one thousand less than a given number and have had all sorts of interesting discussions about how we know if numbers are odd or even and how a thousand is the same as ten hundreds.

This year, we have new Homework Diaries. To familiarise yourself  with its contents, please work through the first ten and final three pages with your children. This is the only homework this week, although any reading, spelling, times tables and online maths you can do will be greatly beneficial. We will set further homework in the coming weeks.

Wishing you a restful weekend.

Team 4.

This year, the children have been working really hard learning how to successfully edit and improve their own work. They got to show off these skills this week when editing and publishing their non-chronological reports in our English lessons.

In maths, we thought about when in our lives we would need to be able to read a timetable (School, to catch public transport, for our camping experience!) and we applied our time skills to help us read timetables and find the duration of events using a number line.

On Friday, the children spent all day in their new classes – we hope they had a great transition day and got to know their new teachers a little better – we certainly enjoyed our time with our new classes and are looking forward to next year.

Last but definitely not least, it was our Year 4 camping experience Friday night. All children and staff involved had a fantastic night camping on the school field. They did team building, scavenger hunts, nature art and den building as well as having free time to spend in their tents, with their friends and playing sport. After all that fun, we had some down time, singing songs and toasting marshmallows before a bed time story. Thank you to everyone who lent us a tent, to the staff who gave up their Friday evening and to the children for being so well behaved and really embracing the camping lifestyle – we had a super time and the winners of the ‘Best kept’ tent award will be announced shortly!

Here we are at the end of another week – we don’t know where the time is going!

This week in Year 4, we have started our R.E unit on Sacraments where they have been learning about Samuel anointing David and how Moses and Samuel were called to follow God in the bible.

In English, the children have been writing their first drafts of their non-chronological report on Grendel (the monster from our text driver, Beowulf!) – they will be going on to edit and publish these next week and we are looking forward to seeing the end products!

In maths, we have been doing some open ended investigations where the children had to use their knowledge of area and perimeter to solve some challenges.

We continue with our Viking work in History, focussing on the revolutionary design of the Viking Longship and how this enabled them to invade and raid several countries including ours. Ask the children if they can tell you the features of a Longship and how they helped the Vikings!

We hope all of the children enjoyed their first transition morning with their new teacher, please look out for the parent mail which will give you further information.

Have a lovely weekend.

As we enter the last few weeks of the school Year, Year 4 have been having lots of fun. We had a very successful sports day last week and it was lovely to see all of the children participating and cheering their teams – well done!

In literacy, we have been reading the text ‘Beowulf’ by Michael Morpurgo. The children have written some emotive diary entries in role as King Hrothgar – here is an extract by Nicolas (4HA):

‘ Heartbroken. It’s the only word I can use to describe this terrible day. I sit here writing to you Diary as my hand shakes with fear and tears drip down in terror. The hellish monster has destroyed everything, even my strong warriors. I thought we would be safe but I failed. What am I going to do?’

Ask your children what the desperate King did next!

In maths we continue to do daily arithmetic with a focus on choosing the correct method to use to solve a calculation. We have also been working out the perimeter of shapes and using our knowledge of converting fractions and decimals to help.

There are lots of exciting things happening in the next couple of weeks including the Year 4 camping trip  which we’re all looking forward to!

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 🙂