Year 4 News 21.10.22

What a busy half term we have had! It is hard to believe our first half term is coming to an end, the first weeks have just flown by!

In English this week, we are learning to rehearse our model text using our own actions. We also learnt more about fronted adverbials, sorted them into groups for time- when? place-where? and manner-how? and created our own examples in a variety of sentences. We then created a non negotiable year 4 toolkit and a toolkit of skills needed to write our own letters. In our final lesson this week, we wrote a short burst write focusing on using frowned adverbials and boxed up the text to help us to understand the structure. .

We continued to learn about negative numbers and completed our end of unit quiz in Maths this week. We then moved on to learn about our new unit of addition and subtraction. In our first lesson, we learnt about adding and subtracting ones, tens, hundreds and thousands using place value grids. In our next lessons, we then learnt about using the column addition method. Our first lesson focused on adding two four digit numbers without exchanging and we then needed to exchange in our second lesson.

In my happy mind, we learnt all about how neurons work in the brain to form neural pathways. Once these pathways have been established, we practise the new steps in learning. This helped us to link this new learning back to one of our key words – Neuroplasticity. We are beginning to recognise that learning something new can be tricky at first but eventually, over time, it will become easier, and these once tricky things can form habits.

Our PSHE lesson this week was linked to our health and well-being lessons. We worked in groups to identify what alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks are. We then found out more about the risks and effects of alcohol. We thought carefully about what we had learnt and posed questions at the end of the lesson. We also welcomed PC Nick into our classroom to lead a session on staying safe at Halloween and Bonfire night celebrations. It was great to see you contribute to this session.

In RE, we began by sharing our reflections from our previous lesson. This gave us a great starting point to complete our final RE piece. Using and outline of a cross and a bible, we started to create a wordle to answer What does the book of Daniel teach us about God?

We had our final Forest school lesson this week. Mr Hadfield had many exciting activities planned for us this week. We took part in some of our favourite activities. The children recreated their Viking villages and were able to act out life there. We then made a Viking longboat which the children were then able to use to role play the attack on Lindisfarne. We also enjoyed spending rime developing our archery and fire building skills. The children seemed to really enjoy our last session together.

In our History lesson this week, we learnt about the final Viking battle. This was the Battle of Stamford. We learnt about how Harold Hardrada took the Vikings to fight Harold Godwinson. We rated the amount of power that the Vikings had during this battle and concluded why the battle was unsuccessful!

Throughout our reading activities this week, we continued to read Viking text. This week we focused on developing our scanning techniques by thinking about which key words we would need to look out for in the text. We answered questions about Viking beliefs, Vikings homes and Kings.

In some of our time on Friday afternoon, we spent some time considering the qualities of good friendships. We called these the friendship builders (the good things we do to build friendships) and we also discussed the friendship blockers (things we do to affect friendships). We are hoping to develop our friendship builder skills.

We hope you have a wonderful half term break.

No homework has been set but we please ask that you take part in the TT Rockstars battle.

Mrs Pointon and Miss Welch