Year 4 News 1.12.23

We were excited to start our new Maths unit on multiplication and division this week. We explored the new vocabulary and used our knowledge or arrays in our area unit to apply to help us answer multiplication questions written as a family of facts. We have learnt about understanding 6 times tables. Understanding fact families and multiplying and dividing by 6. We have enjoyed practising our times table skills daily during our daily 10 time and having some time to play on TT rockstars. 

In English, we began the week by writing a setting description. We used our model text to create a detailed description of a mountain environment and used expanded noun phrases to describe both the setting and the approaching weather. We have then spent time this week to unpick the text and look for key writing skills. We have focused on verb inflections, adjectives and prepositions in noun phrases, pronouns, fronted adverbials, prepositions, verbs to make the weather sound violent, emotive language and short sentences to create tension. We have also spent time to understand the structure of our writing. At the end of the week, we have thought about the feelings of our characters and describing the setting around them. We will use this next week to write our own character descriptions.

In RE, we spent time looking at our Questful learning map to summarise our learning from our first RE unit. We enjoyed exploring why the Sabbath is important from the perspective of a boy from the Jewish faith. 

We also moved on to our new unit for RE. The focus for this is Christmas. We started our lesson by darkening our room and lighting a candle. We considered how Jesus is considered as light of the world. We then listened to a Christmas song based on the bible verse from Gospel of John 1:1-14. We thought about how this linked. The children created their own poems about light. 

We spent time on our research task in Geography this week. We used the iPads to find out more about our chosen city in North or South America.

In our dance lesson this week, we continued to add to our routines. This week, we used our poem from reading 'To Asgard'. We looked at verses from the poem and used these ideas to create motifs of dance movements. We then performed these in groups and the class guessed which part of the poem each group had based their motifs around. 

In our HeartSmart lessons this week, we covered two important ideas. We started by thinking about how we are all unique. We took time to compare our hair length, shoe size, eye colour, lengths of our fingernails and more. We showed how these measurements are never going to be the same for different people because we are all completely unique. We had fun gathering these measurements. In our second HeartSmart lesson, we focus on how brilliant we all are. Using a dice, we rolled and landed on a number. The number corresponded with a statement which we then shared. We discussed things like 'I am great at...' and 'A kind thing I have done today is...' We enjoyed celebrating our differences and strengths and achievements. 

We enjoyed reflecting on our wellbeing task this week – thinking of things we miss but reflecting on how important our memories are and how positive this is. 

Our theme day has taken place this week. We had a fantastic day on Wednesday immersing ourselves in all things Vikings! We started our day by learning to write like a Viking – using runes. We wrote messages in runes which we needed to decode! We then went on to create Viking broaches and necklaces to add to our theme day costumes. After our break, we completed the catapults that we have been creating during our DT lessons. We learnt about the differences between using a small elastic band and a large one. We realised that this would affect the tension in the firing arm. After the catapults were finished, with their reinforcements, they were tested! We really enjoyed loading and firing our catapults. We were so impressed with how far our marbles and tin foil travelled. We then went on to build Lego structures which we attempted to knock down. Later on in our day, we took part in a Viking quiz. This was enjoyed by everyone in class and really put our Viking knowledge to the test. We had a great day and a huge thank you for our fantastic costumes and treats which we enjoyed.

Later on in our week, we evaluated our catapults to complete our DT unit. 

We have had another exciting week in Year 4 and hope you have a wonderful weekend. 

Spagtastic homework has been set for this week. 

Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon