Year 4 News 17.06.22

Alongside rehearsing our model text, character work has been one of our focuses in English this week. We used our model text to get to know one of the characters in more detail. Using a toolkit, we then worked as a team to gather a variety of different descriptions to describe an image of an old man. We thought carefully about using powerful adverbs, adjectives and language devices like similes. Our short burst write featured all of these skills. We have also been learning about speech in more detail. The class, by now, are very familiar with the expectation for using speech within writing, however, this week, we discussed broken speech. This is a concept where the speaker may pause and complete an action before continuing to speak. The children learnt how they can write this in their own work using the correct punctuation.

Within reading, our comprehension work began by looking at an extract from the Firework Maker's Daughter. Lila was going on a treacherous journey. We discussed the effect of repetition and used the text to discover the clues to explain why it was such a difficult journey.

In our Maths lessons this week, we completed our money unit. In each lesson, the children have been using the coins to add, subtract, problem solve, round and even multiply and divide their money. We have learnt many key skills and most importantly used what we had previously learnt about decimals to help us. Solving problems has also been a key feature of our Maths lessons this week. Part whole models have been very useful to answer the questions with more than one step. We applied both our times table and division facts to answer a variety of questions. We ask, the following this new knowledge, you continue to encourage the children to learn about money. Identify coins in a purse or paying for items in the shop and working out the change is a fantastic way of doing this.

In Geography we explored new vocabulary related to rivers. To enhance our understanding, we drew each feature and then played games associated with this new vocabulary. We are now becoming experts to give definitions for the following words; mouth, source, estuary, meander and tributary.

Our RE lesson enabled us to learn all about the act of worship in the Hindu faith called Puja. We explored what this worship may look like with a focus on the puja set which holds a bell, water in a pot, a small picture of a god, a small lamp, food offerings and incense. We then saw a video of a Hindu worship and we were interested to discover that this worship appeals to all of the five senses.

In History, we had the opportunity to find out more about the Shang people. Using images, we investigated the hierarchy of different groups of people. We learnt that this was a way to organise people, and once we knew the order of the groups, we were then able to research what life was like for each of the people. By the end of the lesson we shared our new learning, and we had lots to say!

During our Art lessons this week, the children learnt more about the process of Batik. We looked again at examples of traditional Batik designs. The children then created their own Batik design in their art books. This will now become our design for our fabric. We will apply our wax resist layer and then add dye to create the traditional bright coloured fabric.

In our Computing lesson this week, we learnt about the concept of an animator. We started our lesson by watching some well-known animated films – Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. The children were also shown Morph – some of the children had already seen this character before. We talked about how we need to plan an animation which involves small changes to make our characters appear to move. We watched a behind the scenes of Wallace and Gromit to see the animators in action. Towards the end of our lesson, we planned our own 6 scene animation.

During our Science lessons this week, we revisited our work on Levon Biss – he is an artist who takes thousands of photographs of insects for Scientists to observe. This process allows Scientists to identify the smallest differences in insects and helps to classify them further. We have been learning about classifying during our lessons. The children then went on to create larger scale drawings of Levon Biss' insects using a grid method. The children looked carefully at the images on the iPads and were able to zoom in for the very small details. After we had recreated the art work, the children went on to classify something else – dolly mixture! The children were given a bowl of dolly mixture and create a classification key to represent the different sweets. Once the children had created their keys, they were allowed to eat them!

You continue to impress me with how hard you work Year 4 and how much knowledge you all have!
Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon