Year 4 Weekly News 18.10.24

Our Maths skills have developed in many ways this week to include adding 4 digit numbers with more than one exchange. We have then been developing our knowledge of subtraction. We have used place value grids and column methods to represent subtractions with exchanges. Using our visual representations, we have been able to show how we exchange from a higher value column when we are unable to subtract from the value column that we are in. We have become really confident with this throughout the week moving from subtracting 4 -digits with no exchange, with one exchange and then more than one. Finally, ending our week by learning about exchanging across columns.

We have been making lots of preparations for our News report writing task. Our lessons have given us the opportunity to gather our ideas, recap the features of speech sentences and complete a short role play. We have also learnt about taking eye witness quote and understanding how to write these in our work. We have also learnt about the writing skills used within a news report and how we can structure our own work. We completed our writer's knowledge activity to identify skills to use in our own work. We then have completed two incidental writes: one based on using witness quotes within our work and one about a news reporter paragraph. We have then ended the week by starting our plans.

In Reading, our week began with a new focus on poetry. We looked at rhyming patterns within a Viking poem to Asgard and we began to think about examples of assonance. We have also enjoyed reading aloud as a class to help build our fluency. We have then enjoyed reading our big cat books aloud.

We engaged in a Black History month assembly this week highlighting the importance of role models and how what we can learn from the lives of people throughout history.

Our Geography learning this week was full of different elements. We talked about what we already knew about places in the Americas, including the most recent hurricane in Florida. We recapped the our knowledge of oceans and lines of latitude and longitude to help us locate the continents of North and South America. Using atlases we then located countries with both continents.

In Computing, our task was to think about the main features of a website. Once we had established this, we thought about the advantages and disadvantages of different people being able to edit and upload information into a website.

In our Viking dance unit, we created a group dance using everyone's wonderful ideas. We knew that to create a good routine we needed to include different levels, formations and pathways and we had to keep in time with the music and with each other so we clapped along to the beat of the music so we could carefully time each move and make it flow beautifully.

Combining our RE and Black History lessons allowed us to continue to explore the theme of the impact of Jesus' teaching on people from History. We used the iPad to research the lives of either Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela. We then spoke about how Jesus' teaching may have impacted their lives and what impact they had on history. We completed our quesftul maps for this unit and answered our big question: Why do Christians believe Jesus is the son of God? We then started to create a piece of artwork to reflect our Black History Month learning.

In our French lesson, we enjoyed finishing off learning the French names for our pets. We then took part in conversations and played a game of bingo!

We listened to a song about Martin Luther King. We learnt some more facts about achievements in his lifetime. We also talked about his famous quote, 'I have a dream.' This month is Black History Month and we have been learning about famous black people and their fights for equality. We shared our favourite black music artists. To end our lesson, we listened to a song by Bob Marley entitled, 'Three Little Birds.' We sang along and enjoyed the positivity of this song.

In forest school this week, we worked in smaller groups to make our own Viking settlements. We used our creative minds to add everything that we thought the Vikings would need. We really enjoyed spending time role playing life as a Viking. In our session this week, we also had the opportunity to build and light our own fires. We really enjoyed toasting our marshmallows. Again this week, we showed amazing team work and made Mr Hadfield and I really proud.

In our Science lesson this week, we took time to think about ways that we can group organisms. We came up with a fantastic list of ways to compare and group different living things. We even considered whether animals are nocturnal or organism live underground. We watched a fantastic video to further our use of scientific language. This learning will be important when we make more classification keys next week.

Maths.co.uk homework has been set this week.
Have a lovely weekend.
Mrs Morris and Mrs Pointon