Year 4 Weekly News: 21.4.21

And that's it for another week in Year 4! We've achieved so much this week...
In Book Club, we spent the week reading aloud and practising our reading fluency. We read a range of books and made sure to record in our reading diaries. We also continued to leave book reviews via the reading website, keep up the hard work!

In English this week, we built upon imitation stage of our T4W unit all about the Iron Man. We used boxing up to help us think about the different parts within chapter 1. From this, we were able to create our very own writing toolkit, which linked to our targets. We then started to adapt and change chapter 1, completing a series of shared "innovation" writes. By the end of the week, we had all written fantastic descriptive writes about the Iron Man, full of similes, adjectives through a range of varied sentence lengths!
In Spellings, our focus was on the spelling patter 'ssion' when added to a ending in ss or mit. We used our spelling books to practise adding the ssion ending. We throughout about words such as admission, permission, discussion and transmission. On Friday, we completed a special focus lesson upon the 'ou' spelling pattern in words such as ''enough and tough''. We learnt that it makes a different sound and practised these spellings!

In Maths, we continued to build upon our knowledge of decimals! We thought about how two decimals can make a whole, and were able to order a series of decimals too! We used our knowledge of place value to think about which decimals were greater or less than. By the end of the week, we had moved onto rounding decimals to the nearest whole number. We recapped the skill of rounding and this helped us to round decimals such as 2.7, 3.5 and 7.9 to the nearest whole number!

In our Computing time, we continued our new project all about stop motion animation. We recapped the previous week's learning and talked through the tools we could use whilst on the Stop Motion app. We introduced more resources this week to animate, including toys, cars and animals to create some fantastic mini animations. We also used the 'record' button this week, to add sound to our stories. Next week will see us introduced greenscreen to our creations.
In Geography we started our brand new unit all about energy. We thought about why we need energy and listed lots of reasons! Energy is needed for almost everything! We then discussed how we make our energy, which led us to discuss non renewable energy and renewable energy sources. We researched the two different types, creating a poster in our topic books – what an exciting start to our topic!

In PHSE, we continued with our ''Fake is a Mistake'' unit! We listened to a story about Boris the Robot and The Scrapman. We talked about how some characters in the story showed Boris love, whilst others 'got in his head' and made him feel low, little and unloved. We decided to focus upon the people who show us love! We completed an activity about who shows us love and how kind words can have a positive impact on us!

This week in music, we covered so much! To start our lesson off, we practised playing C, D, E, F and G. Blending our sounds together was our main focus. We played rhythms to help us achieve this. Our task today was to follow Mr Norbury's lead as our conductor. This helped us know when to play long or short notes. Playing the correct sound made us sound in sync with one another; as where extra, or loud notes can make us stand out for the wrong reason. As the lesson progressed, it became harder as we split into 2 groups playing different notes to the same rhythm. This is called playing in harmony. We then learnt our 6th note which was 'A.' This proved tricky as it's quite a high note and we had to blow our air out faster. Next week we will learn our 7th note and also learn to play Old MacDonald had a Farm.

In Science, we finished our unit on animals including humans. We started the lesson by writing a conclusion to our teeth decay experiment. It was fantastic to read about your findings, we will definitely be brushing our teeth from now on! We then looked at food chains. We recapped all the scientific words we knew about this topic and created our own food chains from this! Well done, Y3!

In R.E, we continued to think about baptism and our bigger question of the church community. We had a very special visit from Mrs Hughes. We thought about questions to ask her and found it extremely interesting to listen to all her experience about the church community and baptisms. Thank you, Mrs Hughes!

In French this week, we practised greetings and classroom instructions throughout the week. It was fantastic to hear our confidence in French growing as we responded to french instructions within our daily lessons. Next week we will focus on how to talk about our families!

In Film Club this week, we started to watch a new film, Turbo! We were inspired by the slow motion scenes within the film and decided to create our own. We used the iPads to record a series of mini slow motion films, they were so funny to see!

In Worship through the week, we discussed a number of key issues and bible stories. We listened to the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, whilst we also thought about Pentecost and its meaning.

In P.E, the rain stopped our rounders game dead in its tracks! So, instead, we focused upon what makes a good sports person. We thought about the obvious things such as strength, power and endurance. However, we quickly moved onto talking about qualities such as respect, teamwork and fairness. We watched a series of fair play moments and discussed them! We then created sportsmanship posters, these were fantastic, well done, Y3/4!

Have a lovely weekend,

Mr Dale