Year 4 News 24.11.23

Our English lessons began with lots of clues to help us make predictions about our new text. The final clue was the word outsider and we worked hard to understand what this meant to us. It was great to make references to the amazing illustrations in the story. We saw a polar bear in a forest setting and we thought carefully about why the polar bear was in an unusual habitat. We have learnt that our outcome for writing in this unit is based on an outsider narrative. Using the vehicle text, we explored the themes within in. We then thought about other well-known outsider narratives and have shared a few. We have also explored an example text which shows us what we are working towards creating for ourselves. One of our spag focuses has been on using and understanding preposition so we have explored these in the text. We then went on to unpicking the impact of the text and the way it has been written.

Finding the area has continued to be our main focus in Maths. We used the strategies of counting squares and our times table facts to create an array to help us find our answers. We have learnt about drawing shapes using our knowledge of times tables too. Comparing shapes using their area has also been a focus. At the end of our week, we consolidated our knowledge through our end of unit discussion and arithmetic quiz.

Our spelling focus this week has moved on to look at the prefix inter. We learnt that it can be added to a root word and means among or between.

In our Reading lessons this week, we have enjoyed our big cat books and sharing our books from home. Many of the children are working hard to achieve their reading challenge awards. Our website for book reviews is

Our RE learning this week gave us the opportunity to consider the impact of Jesus. To do so, we were set a research task to find out about the lives of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Our research skills were tremendous, we were very impressed at the level of content and the way this new knowledge was applied. Well done Y4!

We recapped our place knowledge vocabulary to describe a location in Geography. We then set about choosing a city in North or South America to research. We used atlases and iPads to create a fact sheet about our chosen city.

Within our Art lessons this week, we have learnt about the art of tessellated designs to create a pattern. We learnt how to create our own stencils and then used these to create repeated patterns in our art books.

Computing this week allowed us to learn more about the art of creating podcasts. Having already learnt about recording sounds and trimming our recordings, we moved on to learn about layering sounds. We listened to a podcast which encompassed spoken voice and sound effects alongside each other. We then learnt how we could download a sound effect, import it into our sound app and then add this alongside our voice recording. We explored how we could lower and increase the volumes of our sound effects when they had been added.

In HeartSmart this week, we learnt to 'Let Love In'. We thought about times when we recognised that we felt love from others and shared these as a class. We agreed to be more open to love over the coming weeks and reflect on when people had shown love and kindness to us.

In wellbeing this week, we reflected on what we are most proud of. It was a lovely time to stop and celebrate our personal achievements.

Within our French lesson this week, we have learnt how to introduce other people to our friends. Using their names and explaining who they are.

In our science lessons this week, we created a water cycle wheel. We loved being creative and making an interactive wheel to show the process of the water cycle.

Was the last Viking invasion successful? This was the focus of our History lesson. We learnt about the last Viking invasion and completed a task which allowed us to think of the success of the Vikings. Using the icon of a battery we showed their strength. At the end of the task, we were able to look over the statements and decide whether the Vikings were successful. We came to the conclusion that they were not and provided reasons in our books.

As part of our dance lesson this week, we learnt about using the stimulus of a poem to support our design of movements and patterns. Using our poem from our Reading lessons 'To Asgard'. We explored the characteristic of the Viking gods and tried to embody them within our dance movements.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Maths.co.uk homework has been set this week.

Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon