Year 4 News 6.10.22

We have been very busy preparing for our KS2 Harvest Worship this week – practicing our lines and our signing.. Thank you in all the donations we have received. The service was amazing and everyone spoke fantastically to deliver our important message. Thank you for attending our service.

In English, our focus has been to write our version of our defeat the monster story using the model text to help us. We have been applying our skills confidently and we can see your vocabulary and style of sentences building each lesson.

In our reading activities this week, we have continued to enjoy our Year 4 challenge books and have been reading our big cat books aloud.

In maths this week, we have continued to develop our place value knowledge. This week, we have accessed arithmetic starter activities each day. We have also been developing our knowledge of comparing 4-digit numbers. We used place value grids for this. We compared numbers by using greater than, less than and equal to symbols. We also learnt how to order numbers to 10000. A focus for this was on using ascending and descending order.

We are becoming very knowledgeable about the cities in North and South America. In Geography, we used atlases to identify the cities in South America and seeing a selection of photos enabled us to see what each place is like.

In RE we looked back on our reflections for our big question and then became more familiar with the story of King Nebuchadnezzar and the Dream. We created our own reflections using our senses and wrote them as if we were Daniel.

During this week's my happy mind lesson, we learnt all about the A in team HAP which represents the Amygdala. We learnt that this part of the brain can take over and stop us from using the other two parts of the brain. This may happen when we are worried. We learnt that the Amygdala cannot tell whether a situation is dangerous or if we are just worried about it. Our journal time allowed us to draw or write a time when the Amygdala reacted, but the danger wasn't quite real.

Our Heartsmart PSHE lesson had two elements this week. In the first part, we were asked to think about the characteristics that we would like to grow in our classroom. We learnt that these are positive characteristics like kindness, honesty and generosity. We likened this to how we can grow seeds into wonderful plants. We then planted a selection of seeds which we will look after over the coming weeks. There was a story to the second part of the lesson which taught us more about being cautious about who we trust. We thought about the people who we trust and why we feel happy and safe to trust them.

In our computing lesson this week, we continued to develop our coding skills. The children accessed the hour of code activities to practise their skills.

In Art this week, we created our own pointillism inspired colour wheels. This gave us a chance to practise our colour mixing as well as our pointillism technique.

In our History lesson this week, we have had learnt even more about the Vikings! The knowledge that you already have amazes me! This week, we learnt about Danelaw. The children were shown the key words; treaty and kingdoms. The children were then told about the creation of Danelaw. To show their learning, the children were given two maps – one of life before the Vikings (Anglo-Saxon Britain) and a later one which represents the land given to the Vikings as part of the Danelaw treaty. The children were asked to recreate these maps using play dough and explain the differences. Your answers were fantastic.

In our Science lessons this week, we continued to learn about creating our own classification keys. This time, we used leaves and animals as our topic. We recapped how we made our leaf classification key last week. We then played a classification game. The children were given drawings of plants and asked to group them into 'families'. The aim of this activity was to identify similar characteristics in our plants. In our very wet Forest schools sessions, we learnt more about Viking life. The children were given clay to make their own Viking pots. Mr Handfield taught us how to use the thumb technique. Later in our session,

Have a wonderful week,

Mrs Pointon and Miss Welch