Year 4 News 13.05.22

In Maths this week, we have explored tenths and hundredths in more detail to divide by 10 and 100. Place value charts and hundredths grids have been useful to understand the value of each digit when we divide. We have worked hard to explain our answers too. Following on, we consolidated our knowledge of dividing by 100 and have recapped this throughout starter activities all week. By the end of the week, we completed our end of unit assessment.

In our shared write time in English, we have used our plans to write our own wishing tale. In the model text, we have looked for examples of fronted adverbials and relative clauses, and we have worked hard to write speech sentences. Each paragraph was modelled and the children wrote theirs. Towards the end of the week, we started to think about what our next piece of writing would look like.

Conductors and insulators were the main focus within Science this week. Our lesson was full of practical investigation. We built a circuit to test which materials conduct electricity. We were very interested to find out that a graphite pencil (sharpened at both ends) can conduct electricity. We learnt that wood, plastic and a rubber band are insulators. Well done Year 4, I can really see you Science knowledge growing each week.

Why is it important to know where China is? This was one of our questions in Geography this week. To start with, we became familiar with the outline shape of China. As a class, we ranked the best ways to find where China is and then used a variety of maps and globes to locate China, and the surrounding countries. Google Earth gave us the opportunity to find the Great Wall of China, and we were able to make comparisons between Hong Kong and Beijing. We created mind maps of our new knowledge in groups.

In our Computing lesson this week, we took part in our next coding lesson. For this, the children were asked to think about conditionals (instructions given for an unknown circumstance e.g. if blocked, move left. The children loved the lesson as it was minecraft themed.

Science this week was all about living things. As always, we began our lesson by recapping the acronym MRS GREN which symbolises the characteristics of living things. We then went on to recap how we create a classification key. The children were asked to create a classification key for fruit. We thought about how important it is to know lots of information about organisms before we can begin to classify them. We then looked at some of Darwin's first sketches of living things he found whilst exploring the world. We then looked at how people still look closely at the animals they found. We look at an example of organisms which have been photographed by an artist. We explored these on the website and began to sketch these ourselves.

Baptisms are our focus in RE. We started our lesson by thinking of what questions we wanted answering about baptisms. Next, we watched Reverend Alison's video which answers questions people have about baptism. We then watched two videos; one of an infant baptism and the next one was an adult baptism. We thought about the main elements of a baptism.

Finally, in our History lesson this week, we learnt about where the Shang Dynasty was in History in comparison to other civilisations. We created another class timeline of the points of history we have learnt about so far. We then looked at the Shang Dynasty on a map of China. This showed us how small the Shang Dynasty was in relation to modern China.

We have had another wonderful week. Spag.com homework has been set for this week.

Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon