Year 4 Weekly News 4.10.24

Our writing focus this week has been to complete our setting description based on our Whale book. As writers, we brought our writing alive by using the following features, and we like to call this our writer's knowledge; different nouns, similes, personification and speech sentences. Our editing skills have been put to the test this week as we have had the opportunity to reread and edit our extended write. We have used checklists, marking codes and the writer's toolkit to help us.

Each day, we have practised our reading to improve our fluency.

In Maths, we have continued to round numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. Over the course of the week, we have continued to embed the knowledge of deciding numbers as well as multiples which come before and after any given number. We have now completed this unit but will continue to revisit rounding in our starters. We ended this week by sharing our end of unit check.

In Computing, our unplugged activity was a great way to find out more about what types of media can be shared on the World Wide Web, together with where websites are stored and how we can access the World Wide Web using a web browser.

As geographers, we have begun to think about Americas and have used one of our favourite songs to work out that the Americas are made of two continents, North and South America. We explored what we already knew about the Americas, which include amongst others that different languages are spoken, and there are different types of money used.

In our Forest school and science learning this week, we considered why trees are important. They provide habitats for living things, provide us with oxygen to breathe and remove carbon dioxide from the air, they can provide us with food, provides us with wood and give us a beautiful landscape to look at. We then took leaves from every tree in our school grounds and learnt how we can classify and group these leaves using yes and no questions to create a classification key. We made one as a group and then created our own version as a game in pairs. Later on in our session, we joined Viking school. We learnt how the Vikings may have made shelters when they first attacked Britain. We worked in teams to make our own shelters and thought about what a Viking would need.

In our History lessons this week, we revisited the reasons why Britain changed as a result of Danelaw and why this meant the Vikings were powerful. We also put the final touches to our newspapers we wrote in lesson 2.

In PE, the children were given a new poem to use as inspiration for their dances. After selecting the verse they wanted to dance to, the children worked in their teams to make the moves flow like the poem and ensure they included different formations. They are working hard on their teamwork at the moment ensuring good communication and cooperation in their teams.

To make sure we were confident singing our Harvest Service songs, we practised them again in our music lesson. We definitely love the Big, Red, Combine Harvester song! We then moved on to our glockenspiel learning. We played high C, D, F, G and A. Note G was in the centre of the glockenspiel and it was a nice challenge for us to play the major scale on the glockenspiel. We only had to turn the tempo down a small percentage this week. We are determined to increase our playing accuracy and play on 100% by the end of this half-term.

In RE, we spent time looking at verses from the Bible which spoke about Jesus working on the Sabbath. We answered the following questions;What is the Sabbath?When is the Sabbath?Why is the Sabbath important?Is the Sabbath remembered today?Why were the Pharisees so horrified by Jesus' words and behaviour? We learnt about what the Sabbath is and why this is important to both Christians and people of Jewish faith. We then continued to use ourQuestful learning map to summarise our learning from our first RE unit.

In our Art lesson, we invented our own simple rules or guidelines to make 2-d works using tape, oil pastels, crayons pens and markers. We used inspriation from the work of Sol Lewitt and explored an online gallery of his work. The patterns we created by following our own sets of rules were fantastic.

In wellbeing this week, we focused on what 'bugs' us. This gave the children time to reflect on what they struggle with and we learnt about using the butterfly hug to regulate our emotions.

Harvest has been a large focus for us throughout our week. We have enjoyed spending time to practise our service, our words and our songs. We are looking forward to sharing it with you on Tuesday (8th October).

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