Welcome To Y4!

Welcome to Year 4!

We have had a wonderful first week together. I have loved getting to know you all. Throughout the week, we have been busy doing many different fun and exciting things, and you have already achieved so much.

For our first morning together, we settling into things by getting to know each other whilst making magnificent creations with lego. Then, we got to know the classroom by doing a scavenger hunt!

After getting used to being back in school, we jumped into the normal routine of the school day by starting our Maths and English lessons. Here's what we've been up to.

This week in Maths, we explored numbers up to 1,000. We practised identifying the place value of each digit in a 3-digit number and used place value charts, counters and dienes blocks to help us partition numbers in different ways. Everyone worked really hard to explain how each digit changes depending on its position, and we even began to compare and order numbers using these skills!

We kicked off our new English unit with an exciting mystery! Using some specific items (an old camera, some binoculars,a video of a stormy sea, a pile of nails, a pair of glasses and an old hammer) we tried to predict what our new story was going to be about. We decided it was about an adventurer who got caught in a storm whilst out at sea. For lesson two, our book was revealed! We learnt that it's called The Whale! We dived deeper into the story and zoomed in on the setting. Using some beautiful pictures we gathered nouns and interesting adjectives to create noun phrases. We even used drama to imagine what it would feel like to be in the middle of a storm at sea! You showed great insight discussing the character's personality, and we had some fantastic conversations about mood and description. We used all this knowledge to then create a class poem.

During our afternoons, we have enjoyed DT, PE, Music, History and Wellbeing.

We kicked off our DT project by exploring different frame structures using toothpicks and clay. After discovering how shapes like triangles create strong and stable structures, we got creative and built a range of 3D models. We also learnt about pavilions and where they're used--did you know the Eiffel Tower is considered a pavilion? This session helped us understand the importance of design and stability in structures.

We kicked off our Viking topic by discovering who the Vikings were and where they came from. Using maps and timelines, we found out that the Vikings lived in Scandinavia--modern-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

In music this week we listened to a piece of music called Hoedown. We explored what we thought it was about, the instruments, voices, texture and tempo. We decided it was a dance and the lyrics were giving us in instructions of what to do. We thought it might be an American piece of music.

It has been a wonderful first week together, and I am very excited about being your teacher. I hope you have a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing you all on Monday.

Happy Friday,

Miss Pennance