Year 4 News 3.3.23

It has been great to see Year 4 become familiar with our model based on the Journey of a River. We rehearsed the text, created our own story maps, and had some great discussions about the subject specific vocabulary. We also worked hard on a grammar focus to learn about Determiners. We learnt that a determiner and a noun makes a noun phrase. We then learnt about organising information using subheadings. We completed an activity on organising facts about the digestive system. We then focused on using interesting fronted adverbials, subject specific language and brackets to write a short burst based on the stomach. 

In Maths, we have applied our skills within our equivalent fractions lessons, and then moved onto simplifying fractions. We used our key fact knowledge well to times or divide the numerator and denominator by the same number. In the next two lessons, we then learnt about fractions greater than one, using fraction strips, we showed how a fraction can be represented as mixed number and improper. We then also learnt about adding fractions. For this, our denominator stays the same. 

We have spent time reading our challenge books this week in Reading time, and continued our spelling focus to learn about the prefix inter.

In Geography, our lesson focused on learning about the water cycle. Did you know that the water that flows through our rivers had been around since dinosaur times? We explored the process together using questions like how and why do puddles dry up? In small groups, we used a selection of key facts to design some brilliant information posters. We will look forward to seeing more of them in our next lesson.

We recapped our prior learning about Hans Holbein, and the skills we need to create a portrait at the beginning of this week's Art lesson. We explored four paintings by Holbein and talked about what we saw, the meaning of the painting, and whether it made connections to how we felt or our thoughts. We were excited to draw our first portraits too. We were able to finish the other half of the face of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleaves, by drawing and sketching different facial features.

In our computing lessons this week, we have learnt more about animation. We have looked at popular children's films which involve animations. We then used stop motion to create moving messages. We were then able to show a couple of these at the end of our lesson. 

Our English lessons have allowed us to develop our scientific knowledge this week focusing further on the digestive system. These were our science lessons this week. 

In our History lessons this week, we learnt about the Tudor Reformation. The children recapped everything that we had learnt in history so far. We then started to learn about the reformation. The children were given two different drawings of churches to look at – one of a Protestant church and one Catholic Church. The children then read about the different beliefs of Catholic and Protestant people. In our history books, we compared the two beliefs. 

In our RE unit, we completed our salvation unit. The children were asked to think about why Christians believe Jesus is Saviour. We were asked to use what we had learnt about during the Easter story to support our answer. 

We also ended our week by learning more about our emotions. We were given a wide range of emotion cards. We then used this to split them into different zones. We have the red, green, yellow and blue zone. We will continue to do some more learning on this over the next few weeks. 

We have set a piece of SPAG.com homework. 

We hope that you are all having a wonderful weekend. 

Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon
We have set a piece of SPAG.com homework