Year 4 Weekly News: 25.6.21

Another fantastic week of learning has flown right on by in Year 4. We've achieved so much this week, from designing our own recycled art to creating our very own electrical circuits!

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! We also completed our comprehension quizzes this week, there were some fantastic reading skills on show, well done!

In English this week, we focused upon all things SPaG. We completed games on fronted adverbials, speech and conjunction work. This helped to make our writing the best it could be. It was fantastic to see everyone using their SPaG knowledge to develop their writing, making it sound fantastic!

In Maths, we finished our unit on statistics. We looked at lots of different graphs this week. We secured our knowledge on bar charts and line graphs. From this, we were able to answer a range of problem solving questions on graphs. We made sure to read each question carefully and use the correct operation to gain our answer. On Friday, we all completed an arithmetic quiz. I was so proud to see everyone using their methods, there were some absolutely fantastic scores, well done team!

Our Computing time was once again focused upon coding. We started by recapping our vocab from last week including "actions". We quickly moved on to discuss our new focus for the lesson – "repeats and loops." We discussed why coders use loops and found out it's because it is much more efficient. We completed an unplugged game whereby we had to code our friend using loops! This then allowed us to complete level 8 of code studio, we all managed to use loops to create the most efficient code possible.

We continued our unit on Jane Perkins in art this week. We built upon our knowledge from the last lesson and discussed some of her work. From this, we created our very own Jane Perkins inspired artwork pieces. We used recycled materials that we had collected ourselves to make collages of the Iron Man. We ensured that we used similar colours, but different materials to ensure a collage effect was created. Check some of them out!
In Worship this week, we discussed a number of key issues and bible stories. On Friday, we joined in with Year 3 to sing a beautiful version of "My Lighthouse."

Our Science learning was all about electricity and circuits this week. We described what a circuit could be, then looked at images of complete and incomplete circuits to explore what a circuit needs. We acted out what a circuit looks like and talked about how important the connections are. With all this in mind we set about testing different circuits. We firstly predicted if the circuit would light a bulb, and if the circuit was complete or incomplete. We then started to test, fix and retest the circuits. By the end of the lesson we could describe the difference between a complete and incomplete circuit.

First we recapped our previous notes and discussed musical terminology we learnt last week. One way for us to remember notes which are placed on each of the 5 lines of a stave is – Every Green Bus Drives Fast (E G B D and F). Notes which fit in the line spaces can be remembered as F-A-C-E. Mr Norbury also taught us that eight notes are called an octave and that October used to be the eighth month of the year, not the tenth month as it is now. We practised starting and stopping, following Mr Norbury who conducted us. We had to think about the differences between a piece of music and a song; a song has lyrics and a piece of music does not. We continued to play: We Are The Best, Hot Cross Buns and We Will Rock You. Focusing on our breathing, we had to ensure our volume was at the correct level, so to not overplay. Next week will be our last lesson! We have come so far since our very first lesson. The last ten weeks have flown by! Our confidence has grown, and we definitely have the brass instrument bug!

In History, we started our new unit all about technology! It was so interesting to think about the key dates of key technology. We found out about phones, tvs and of course the internet! From this, we focused and researched a very famous British person indeed – "Sir Time Berners-Lee" – a computer scientist who helped to create the world wide web. It was very fascinating!

In our Study Work, we completed a brilliant page on our Geography unit. We recapped the negatives and positives of using renewable energy and used this to create a fantastic page around this full of flaps, pictures and information!

Have a lovely weekend,
Mr Dale