Year 4 News 14.7.23

In English, we enjoyed using a freeze frame activity to explore our understanding of being shunned. This enabled us to think about how we can describe our main character, the polar bear, being shunned. We worked amazingly to write our outsider text paragraphs and ten spent time editing our work.We were descriptive, emotive and thoughtful. We followed our plan every step of the way.

In our Maths this week, we have finished our position and direction unit. Learning about how shapes can move on a grid, how we can reason about movement on a grid and learn about plotting on a grid. All fantastic skills to have. To end our week, we celebrated with a game of battleships – using coordinates to sink each other's ships. With Mrs Pointon, we had great fun in our Geometry lesson as we investigated triangles in our school grounds. Our knowledge of quadrilaterals also improved greatly by using geoboards to make regular and irregular quadrilaterals.

In our Health and Relationship lessons, we showed lots of maturity to find out all about how our bodies grow and change during puberty. We acted like scientists to find out about the human life cycle. We then had the option to pose questions. We all shone in the way we responded to the content of our lessons this week. In our second lesson, we learnt about the emotional and physical changes we go through as part of puberty. We thought about the importance of understanding these changes and how this will make us feel better when we begin to recognise these changes ourselves.

We were able to make our final dives into our class read during our reading time this week. It was interesting to see the story text as a playscript. We practised reading aloud and then unpicked how the main characters felt about each other. With Miss Welch, we have had a mix of finishing our reading comprehension unit, focusing on answering questions on our class text – The Firework Makers daughter – and reading our favourite books. We've ended reading quite a lot of class stories this week on our theme of China.

In our spelling lessons this week, we have learnt about adding ir to words and how this changes the meaning.

Geography this week blew our minds. People actually live on volcanoes! Throughout our lesson, we learnt about the advantages and disadvantages of living on and around volcanoes. We used some time to explore google maps and see how people lived on Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador.

We have completed our amazing batik art work this week. Adding the beautiful batik dye using complementary colours from the colour wheel and removing our wax. We love the affect they have created!

This week we have continued to work on our study work books. We are really proud of how these are coming together and these have been brought to life with our covers!

In our science lessons this week, we used the iPad to conduct our investigation. Finding the loudest and quietest places in school. We used a decibel recorder. We enjoyed writing about our findings at the end. In our computing lesson this week, we then showcased these results into a bar chart learning how to input data to excel and adding titles and editing our charts.

As part of our RE lessons this week, we have thought about how God is part of Hindu families. We learnt about the Raksha Bandham – the festival of siblings and protection. As past of this celebration, Hindus make and give bracelets to symbolise their promise to protect their siblings. We made some of our own!

In our HeartSmart lessons this week, we have covered many different topics. We have learnt about how it is important to think of others and think about how others might be feeling without them telling us. We set ourself a target to complete actions which would positively impact others e.g. sharing a smile, inviting someone to join a game etc. In our second lesson, we played the game 'What's missing'. We had to spot what was missing from the pictures. This led us to think about how we need to be observant of others and their actions and feelings.

In our final cricket session this week, we enjoyed playing a game of cone cricket. When you had hit the ball, you had to run and get a coloured cones. The cones were worth different points depending on how far away they were. We all enjoyed fielding and batting. Well done everyone!

What an amazing final full week in Year 4. You are continuing to blow us away with your fantastic skills and learning.

Maths.co.uk homework is set for this week.

Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon