Year 4 News!

A new term can mean only one thing... a NEW topic! This term we are reading the Firework Maker's Daughter written by Phillip Pullman. On Monday, we started the week by exploring the front and back cover of the book. We knew nothing of the story but used what we had in front of us to predict what it may be about. It was lovely to hear about some of the ideas we had and how we supported these ideas with clues from the cover.

We have started our new term off with a lot of Art! We looked at how we could use light and dark to represent shaping. We looked at examples of volcano drawings and sketched our own. To add detail, we used three different mediums throughout the week. We stared off using sketching pencils and learnt five different techniques for shading. We used contouring, cross-hatching and other sketching techniques to add shading to our drawings. In our next lesson we drew another using willow charcoal and used blending and shading. Finally, we used black and white oil pastels on a volcano. We will choose the medium that we think is the most effective to add light and dark to our drawings.

This week in English we have been learning how we can use powerful vocabulary, similes and metaphors to add excitement to our writing. In our first lesson we focused on using appropriate vocabulary which is appropriate to our theme. We used thesaurus' to up-level our word choice. In the following lesson, we learnt how we could use similes and metaphors to describe a setting. We learnt the difference between similes and metaphors and were given examples of each. Over the last two lessons, we have worked with a partner to write our setting descriptions of a volcano landscape. We used descriptive vocabulary, similes and metaphors within our writing. In SPaG this week we have focused on learning the spelling of words with the long 'a' sound. We learnt how words including the 'a' sound are spelt: 'ey, ei and eigh'.

In our Maths lessons, we finished our work on perimeter. We recapped how to measure the perimeter of rectilinear shapes with and without missing lengths. We also learnt how to work out missing lengths of rectilinear shapes when we were given the opposite lengths. We have now moved on to our next unit of multiplication and division. In our first two lessons, we have been learning how to use part-whole models, arrays and bar models to represent multiplication facts. We have also learnt how to show two multiplications as one when the number we are multiplying is the same e.g. 4 x 3 + 3 x 3 = 7 x 3. We used two arrays drawn as one to represent this visually.

In our music lesson this week, we continued to practise the songs and dances for our YoungVoices showcase. The children chose the songs they felt they needed to practise the most to start off with. The children sang Ode to Joy, Queen Medley and Best of the West.

In our History work this term we will be learning about the Shang Dynasty. This is an ancient civilisation which lasted from around 1600BC until 1046BC. In our first lesson, we looked at where the Shang Dynasty took place. We started by locating the Shang Dynasty on a map of China and then we used an Atlas to locate some of the important features of China. Towards the end of the lesson, we moved on to learn some of the key dates of the Shang Dynasty.

If you would like to find out more about what we will be learning this term then please take a look at our newsletter and holistic plan on our class page.

I hope you all have a lovely week.
Miss Welch