Year 4 News 10.3.23

This week, our English lessons have been focussing on writing our shared write. We have become very knowledgeable about the digestive system in Science and we are now using this knowledge to plan and write our shared write. We have also practised the use of brackets as parenthesis by identifying where additional information is given, and checking that the sentence stands alone once the parenthesis are taken away. Before starting our writing this week, we took on the role of scientists and represented the process of the digestive system. This was surprisingly easy using a pair of tights, orange juice, crackers, a plastic bag and two cups. We showed how the food we eat moves through our bodies. We the wrote our non fiction reports.

In Maths, we have been very busy subtracting fractions . We enjoyed using visual representations and number lines to take away improper fractions and mixed numbers. On Wednesday, we continued to learn how to subtract fractions. We used our knowledge of wholes and fractions as a whole to make this process more efficient. By the end of the week, we were applying our problem solving skills to adding and subtracting fractions. This required us to read the questions carefully and sometimes complete two steps.

In Reading, we reviewed pages from two non fiction books and looked at the key features that could be improved. We then moved on to our poetry unit. We have two poetry books to focus on – Wild World and Wild in the Streets. We started to learn about the differences between life above and below the canopy of a rainforest and how the author of the poem uses vocabulary to portray this.

The River Thames was our case study in Geography this week. We learnt that it is the second longest river in England and we used maps to find the source and mouth of the river. Watching a video also gave us lots to think about, and we were surprised to see that the river travels through many villages, towns and cities.We also enjoyed using Digimaps to locate the river, the source and the mouth of the Thames.

In Art, we worked very carefully to create our first self portraits. We practised on whiteboards, followed some key steps to measure and position the size of our facial features. We also began our portrait of King Henry VIII.

In My Happy Mind, we reviewed what we are grateful for, learnt more about why being grateful helps to make us happy and we practised happy breathing on more than one occasion.

In our trumpet lesson this week, we learnt how to play a new song – we have got boogie shoes. We started by playing this in all c notes. However, then adapted this tune to fit E, C and D.

In our RE lesson this week, we have started our new unit on Hinduism. We started this unit by thinking about how we can describe people using their characteristics and the names we give to them – friend, sister, daughter, helper, teacher. As part of this introduction, we played a game of 'who am I'. The children then thought about how this could apply to God. We thought about the different ways we would describe him. We learnt how this is similar to the way Hindus see their God.

We had some DT time this week. We spent time to complete our unit from last term – our Viking catapults. After having cut and started our frames last term, we needed to add the reinforcements and our firing arm. We creating a moving mechanism to do this. Once our catapults were built, they were ready to launch. 3, 2, 1... fire! We launched paper clips and marbles. They really did fly. We were so impressed. After completing the build and testing our design, we evaluated them. We were pleased that they worked but realised we needed a lot more reinforcements if we were to make them next time. Not many survived the catapulting session.

In our Science lessons this week, we have not only spent our English lessons writing about the digestive system but also learnt about our teeth. We are now able to name our teeth and explain their roles.

Within our History lessons, we have learnt even more about the Tudor reformation. This time, looking more closely at the dissolution of the Tudor monasteries. We learnt about why Henry VIII wanted to close down the monasteries for his own gains. As part of our lesson, we wrote letters as though we were monks explaining what Henry had done to our homes.

In computing this week, we have planned our morph animations. After watching a morph clip, the children created their own 6 frame plan. In our next lesson, we will create our morph and make him move.

Maths.com homework has been set for this week.

Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon