Year 4 Weekly News – 18.6.21

We have once again worked hard in everything we have done this week! From researching recycled art, to producing fantastic electric adverts, it's certainly been a great week in Y4.

In Book Club, we spent the week quietly reading. This allowed us to read aloud with an adult, add points for our book reviews and make sure we are all recording in our reading diaries!

In English this week, we continued our persuasive writing. We all completed our 'innovation' stage, whereby we used our model text to create some wonderful persuasive letters to the world leaders. Our purpose was simple, to persuade the world leaders into action over climate change, deforestation and pollution. We spent the week researching these issues and used a range of persuasive devices to write amazing letters. We all stuck closely to our targets and this allowed us to use a range of sentences, using a range of conjunctions. We wrote simple, compound and complex sentences throughout our writing. We made sure that editing was a key focus, so at the end of each lesson we had dedicated editing time to ensure our writing was the best it could be. The final letters sound fantastic, I may even send some off to parliament! Well done, Y4.

In Maths, we had a bit of a strange week! On Monday and Tuesday, we started our new unit on time. We were fantastic at converting times and using this to answer a range of word problems. We then switched to another unit (we will go back to time when Mr Dale is back in class). We started our statistics unit and got stuck into a series of bars and charts. We used Power Maths to answer a range of tricky questions that put our graph knowledge to the test. We will continue with this next week. We also spent time throughout the week completing a number of arithmetic questions, we displayed excellent use of our methods in all the questions we answered!

Our Computing time was great fun! We learnt how to program an interactive dance party. To do so, we recapped our understanding of an event and action, and then set about coding our own dance animations. We planned our routines in response to a range of music, and timed our routines accurately. By the end of the lesson we were pleasantly surprised with our dance routines and we talked about how this task enabled us to be creative with coding.

In PHSE, we concluded our ''Fake is a Mistake'' unit! In this week's lesson, we recapped all the learning we have done around the topic and from this, came up with three reasons as to why Fake is a Mistake. This led to lots of interesting discussions abut being yourself and peer pressure, well done Y4.

In R.E, we started to focus upon our new BIG question of: "Why do Christians follow Jesus?" We broke the question down and thought about the people we follow in our daily lives and why we do this. We then discussed the Gospel of Luke (Luke 5:1-11), "The first miraculous catch of fish". From this, we discussed why the fishermen might have followed Jesus and how we might have felt in that situation too!

In French this week, we recapped our family words. We played our quick game at certain points of the day. We are getting so quick as saying 'il s'appelle and elle s'appelle' for his name and her name!

We began learning about the artist Jane Perkins in Art this week. We were intrigued to see that her artwork is made from a range of materials that may no longer be needed. We played a spot it game, and discovered that she uses lots of different objects to create her collages and uses colour and tone to add more detail. Pic collage was a really helpful tool to summarise our favourite pieces of artwork. We worked in pairs to create our own Pic collage artwork and animations.

In Worship this week, we discussed a number of key issues and bible stories. On Monday, we focused on the hot topic of Naomi Osaka, the Japanese tennis player who has said the interviews she does after a match is impacting her mental health. We had an interesting discussion about whether sports stars should have to do interviews.

Monday saw us complete a fantastic Science lesson to introduce our new unit on electricity! We started with our cold tasks and completed some vocabulary work. We also answered some questions around electricity, these will show us at the end of our topic just how much we have all learnt! We then listened to some videos and information on electricity and noted down any important facts. We worked in teams to create some fantastic TV shows all about electricity and they were fantastic!

This week's music lesson saw us recapping the position of notes on each stave. We had to read the music with the note letter first, and then just the notes. One objective was to see how long we could blow into our instruments for before running out of breath. The last person managed to reach 26 seconds! We played a rhythm of C D E C, C D E C, E F G (long note), E F G (long note) for Frère Jacques. Once we were confident with the notes, we had a go at playing individually and in groups – creating an echo. One thing we did recognise and will work on next week, is how some of us played C not G. Next week we need to ensure that when playing G, we move our lips to make a happy smile to hit this note.

Have a lovely weekend,
Mr Dale