Year 4 News 19.11.21

Throughout our English lessons this week, we have planned and started to write our shared write. We are now three paragraphs in. At the beginning of the week, we recapped how we could use fronted adverbials in our writing. The children made a list of all of their ideas in their back of the book so that they could use these in their writing. We then spent some of our lesson time recapping the entire text through actions so that we were confident with this for our writing. We then planned our own ideas for our shared write. These were marked and everyone was given feedback. Following this, we started to write our text. I modelled each paragraph on the board and the children wrote down their own ideas for their letters. We have our final two paragraphs to finish next week.

In our Maths lessons this week, we have completed our addition and subtraction unit. The children have developed their problem solving throughout the week. We have been given two step problems to work out. The children have learnt about the importance of using mathematical representations such as bar models, part whole models and number lines to help them. After completing our unit, we completed our end of unit assessment. At the end of the week, we focused on developing our timestable knowledge. The children took part in a test in their back of their green handwriting books. This is a great place to keep a record of our scores and we will be using these every Friday. We then had some time in class to use the iPads to improve our knowledge of timestables through the use of TT rockstars. We have talked in class about the importance of using this at home as it helps us to develop our speed and understanding.

This week, a lot of our afternoon time has been based around the theme of 'one kind word' for our anti-bullying week focus. In our first activity, we listened to the story of 'Lucy and the Bully'. This story was about a girl who was been upset several times on purpose by a bull. The bull in the story smashed Lucy's art work, broke her pencils, said unkind words and much more. In the story, Lucy chose to tell an adult and then they were able to help and make things better for her. At the end of the story, Lucy and the bull realised that they had a shared interest in Art. We reflected on the importance of the message in this book. As another part of our anti-bullying week, we completed a 'one kind word' activity. The children learnt about the positive impact saying nice things can have on those around us. We also used a crumpled piece of paper to represent the impact of our unkind words. The children then walked around the room sharing kind words with one another to make them smile. We also watched this years NSPCC video which was hosted by Ant and Dec. It shared the importance message of speaking to people when we have worries. In our final anti bullying activity this week, we learnt about our PANTS. We discussed how important it is to keep our pants private and share any secrets with our trusted adults, if we are asked to keep them.

In History this week, we have learnt about the Anglo-Saxon King, King Alfred. We learnt about his life and answered the question: 'Why was Alfred the Great so great?' We used a range of sources to find out about his life and achievements. We learnt about Danegeld and Danelaw.

In our computing lesson this week, we continued to learn how to use excel spreadsheets to record information and format this information in to a table. Again, this week, we logged on to our class Google Drive. We then accessed a new excel spreadsheet in which we inputted our data from our soundproofing experiment. We recorded the materials we used and the sound level we recorded. The children were then shown how to make this information in to a graph.

We had an interesting music lesson this week. We learnt about our composer of the month – Johann Sebastian Bach. We learnt how his music was composed during the Baroque period. A few of us recognised Bach's 'Brandenburg Concerto No.2: Movement 1. We thought we may have heard it on the television, or in a film. We were divided on liking this piece of music. However, we did find it rather relaxing. Our musician of the month – Louis Armstrong made us smile! We listened to and watched him perform 'What a Wonderful World.' We were mesmerised by his infectious smile and how calm this song made us feel.

In our French lesson this week, we have begun to learn how to say when our birthday is. This involved applying what we had learnt about day of the week and months of the year.

We have also been well and truly feeling the Christmas spirit this week. On Monday, we kick started our week by introducing our Year 3 and 4 Christmas worship with the children. We talked through the worship we will be creating and then began to practise our songs. We will continue to practise these over the next few weeks before recording them to share in our worship. In preparation for our Christmas Markets next week, we have started our Christmas craft. We don't want to spoil the surprise of what we will be selling but take a look at our pictures for a sneak peek. We have also had another Christmas themed RE lesson. We continued to think of examples of good news within the Christmas story. We retold the Christmas story and wrote down 7 different examples of good news that we could think of. We then watched a video of the story of Elizabeth and Zachariah and compared the similarities and differences between this story and the Christmas story.

We also celebrated Children in Need this week by dressing up in something sparkly. We have a great day and everyone looked fantastic.

Have a lovely weekend. I cannot wait for next week and our school Christmas market!
Miss Welch