Year 4 Weekly News 14.6.24

What a way to start the week! Our Firework Maker's theme day was a wonderful action packed day. We were blown away with all the detailed and creative costumes, clothing and handmade items that came in on Monday. Our day was spent learning some Mandarin, writing our names in Chinese, designing, making and tasting our spring rolls alongside tasting other Chinese snacks. In the afternoon, we created Oracle bones from clay and used the ancient script to write a question, story or message. This enabled us to learn that the Shang Dynasty were the first civilisation to develop a system for writing. We even had the opportunity to turn an Oreo biscuit into a plate boundary, and demonstrate how the tectonic plates move. What a lovely day Year 4. Thank you for demonstrating such enthusiasm and team work throughout the day.

To continue our focus in DT, we thought about the steps we took to design and create our spring rolls. We remembered that we had a design criteria to follow, and we looked carefully at our evaluations. On theme day, we tasted a shop bought spring roll and evaluated it using a rating. We then repeated this for our homemade spring roll.

In our English lessons this week, has all been focused on planning and writing our own refugee narratives. We have worked really hard to write the first three paragraphs. We have been focusing particularly well on the use of speech, repetition for effect, apostrophes and personification. Well done Yer 4!

In our Maths lessons this week, we have completed our end of unit assessments for our Time unit. We also confidently took on our Year 4 Multiplication check. I am so proud of every single one of you!

In our lessons, we then started our new shape unit. The first two lessons focused on learning about angles – acute, obtuse and right angles. In our final lesson this week, we then learnt about different types of triangles and their features – isosceles, scalene and equilateral.

In our Reading comprehension lessons this week, we have enjoyed exploring more of our firework makers daughter story and unpicking the different extracts of text.

In our RE learning, we learnt about Islamic faith and mosques. We learnt about the key features of these places of worship and about the role of a Imam. We also looked at extracts that Islamic people read from and thought about how these reflected their beliefs.

During HeartSmart, we learnt about the 'Endurance Expedition'. We learnt about Ernest Shackleton's expedition. We imagined we were setting out on a dangerous expedition like the 'Endurance Expedition' that Shackleton attempted. We designed our own recruitment posters that come be used to find the right people to come along. 'We have troubles all around us, but we are not defeated. We do not know what to do, but we do not give up.' 2 Corinthians 4:8.

Festival feast was the theme of Art this week. We have been given the opportunity to plan and make our own food sculptures. We looked as some inspirational pictures linked to the artists we had explored and chose the food that we would make. We then sketched this in our books and considered the resources we would need to make this.

History this week was based on oracle bones. We learnt about Wang Yirong's discovery of them which led to a large archeological dig and lots of additional history being uncovered. We wrote about this in our books and researched the events using the iPads. We ended our lesson by considering the reliability and usefulness of these sources.

In French this week, we learnt about ways to describe food. We used adjectives to describe the food as big and small as well as by describing the colour.

Science this week was about planning an enquiry. We learnt about different types of scientific enquiry and came up with questions we would like to explore. We decided we are going to try to answer the question: What effects do different substances have on our teeth? We then planned a comparative test that we will conduct in class.

In our second PE lesson this week, we enjoyed learning more about rounders. We took on the role of batters and fielders and learnt skills to make our work more precise. We then enjoyed showing our fantastic teamwork, communication and sportsmanship in a rounders game.

Spagtastic homework has been set for this week.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon