Year 4 Weekly News 22.11.24

Our English lessons began by writing a character description about the polar. We used phrases to describe the polar bears actions and emotions. We have thought about the feelings of our characters and describing the setting around them. We worked hard to use fronted adverbials and emotive language to describe how the polar bear was feeling. We have also then gathered ideas for our writing by thinking of all of the writers skills we are focusing on. Later on, we have planned and started to write our own outsider narrative based on the illustrations from the vehicle text – Leaf.

Finding the area has continued to be our main focus in Maths. Working out the area of rectilinear shapes has given us lots of opportunities to talk about arrays, our counting strategies and how we can use our times table facts to 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 for this week. At the end of our week, we consolidated our knowledge through our end of unit discussion. We also enjoyed designing our own zoo using the area of rectilinear shapes.

In spellings, we have recapped the meaning of the prefix auto to then complete our weekly spelling tasks.

As readers, we enjoyed working on our fluency skills to read independently. Throughout the week, the children have also brought in examples of Outsider Narratives that they had at home linking to our English work. We have enjoyed sharing these in class.

Our second PE lesson gave us the opportunity to practise both our dribbling and our shielding skills. We thought about how we can use different parts of the foot to dribble and how we can position our body to shield an opponent. We worked hard to develop these skills in pairs and then transferred this learning within small football matches.

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. The second command is this: Love your neighbour as you love yourself. Mark 12:31

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, in this battle, they were not and provided reasons in our books.

In French this week, we have learnt the whole alphabet! We can now spell our name for someone in French! Well done us.

We started our new DT unit for this term and what a way to start! Taste testing biscuits! We starter by thinking about different techniques to prepare food,different food groups and how taste testing is an important part of selecting ingredients. We watched a fantastic clip of inside the factory watching how they make digestive biscuits. Target audience was a new word for today. We then tasted our biscuits. We enjoyed a small piece of 6 different biscuits. We thought about the appearance, texture, taste, packaging and target audience for each. We enjoyed tasting existing products to give us some ideas for our own!

In our RE lesson this week, we looked at a variety of paintings of the Nativity. We made comparisons and talked about the use of colour and shapes. We looked at the paintings from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about Jesus. We thought about what the pictures were telling us. We then had the opportunity to create our own piece of art work to represent Jesus as the light coming into the world.

In our Art lessons this week, we have started our final piece. Using our tessellated templates, we are going to create a piece of patterned art work!

We learnt about food chains in Science this week. We learnt about producers and consumers and how the arrows are drawn to show the transfer of energy. We also worked in teams to create our own classification keys. We are becoming living thing experts!

In music this week, we practised our Christmas service songs and continued with learning our Young Voices songs. We practised – Oceania, Pop Medley, Readers are Leaders – chorus 1 and 2, Try Everything and the dance video for Let's Dance.

Key stage 2 have spent some PE time this week preparing for the indoor athletics competition.

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