Year 4 News 26.4.24

We have confidently transferred our knowledge of fractions to recognise tenths as decimals in our Maths lessons this week. We used place value grids to identify the value of each digit. We have also worked on understanding tenths as decimals. We have learnt about dividing one and two digit numbers by 10. On Friday this week, we have also been practising our times tables and taking part in a quiz.

In English, we have explored speech punctuation as our sentence accuracy task and as a role. We wrote direct speech following a role play involving a villain and a good character. We have then planned and written the first two paragraphs of our own twisted narratives. We have thought really carefully about all of our writer's knowledge to showcase, including fronted adverbials, expanded noun phrases, speech and verb inflections.

In our reading time, we have enjoyed sharing our big cat books.

Our spelling focus for this week was on the spelling 'gue' and 'que'.

We marked Earth Day on Monday by looking at this year's focus Planet V Plastic. As a class, we thought about ways we could help. 'I think we could use less plastic bags from shops. Bring our own or make our own. ' 'I think you could turn single use plastics into something useful.' 'Think about alternatives – try and use things that can be recycled.' These are great responses Year 4.

In Geography, we learnt about the land part of the water cycle by learning about how rivers erode mountains. We located mountains on a world map, and enjoyed looking at two keys to identify how tall each mountain is.

In music this week, we continued to build on our improvisation skills from last week. Using our glockenspiels, we improvised using the A minor scale. We had an opportunity to showcase our own improvisations to the class. Well done to those who were brave enough to volunteer.

This week we have continued our athletics unit with hurdles. We have learnt that we have a lead leg when hurdling, which we extend whilst driving our opposite arm in line with it, and a trail leg. After deciding which leg we preferred as our lead leg, we did lots of practise using different heights to suit our ability, we looked at the best distance to take off from and worked on sprinting in between the hurdles.

In our HeartSmart lesson this week, we have focused on the phrase 'Human BEings not Human DOings'. We thought about all of the things that we do. We do football, netball, sing, dance and so much more. We then thought about how what we doing not being who we are. If we are what we do – then when we do something great – we are great. But when we make a mistake or fail – we think we are a mistake or failure. We thought about being first and then doing. If we feel great, we do great things! At the end of our session. We celebrated the great things we can do with a mini talent show. But, instead of clapping for people achievements at the end, we clapped at the beginning to celebrate them taking part and giving it a go. 'You didn't choose me. I chose you.' John 15:16.

Art has been a wonderful focus of our week. Our still life unit was based around studying objects and creating art work. We studied fruit carefully and created detailed sketches. We have then really enjoyed turning our art work into clay tiles. We used tools to carefully add patterns and used slip with additional clay to make a layered design. Please take a look at our photos to see how we got on.

In wellbeing this week, we focused on where our favourite place in the world would be.

In our RE lesson this week, we started our new unit about churches. We started our lesson by using the iPads to explore different places of worship. We created PowerPoints to show the variety of different places of worship. We then reflected on the similarities and differences in these buildings. At the end of our lesson, we reflected on what a church is. We discussed how a church is a group and community who pray together rather than a particular building. We looked at examples of church communities coming together as part of different events and festivals.

Spagtastic homework has been set for this week.

Have a lovely week.
Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon