Year 4 News 19.4.24

Welcome back Year 4! We hope you all had a wonderful Easter. 

We began our Reading task by looking at the front cover of our new story the Firework Maker's Daughter. We were interested to know more abut the main character Lila and where the setting could be. We used our predictions to explore why Lila might be going on a journey.

At the beginning of our week, we completed a fraction lesson based on adding and subtracting different fractions. It was great to see our problem solving skills when we added fractions with different denominations. Our next two lessons were then based on finding fractions of amounts. We learnt about finding fractions of amount by dividing by the denominator and multiply by the number. We then went on to learn about finding the whole amount when given a fraction of an amount. In our lesson on Thursday, we competed our end of unit quiz on fractions. Today, we moved on to our first lesson of our decimal unit – we learnt about tenths as fractions.

One of our English tasks was to explore the villains in various stories. We then summarised a traditional tale plot and looked more closely at how the good characters and villains behave. We found how phrases in the text were used to express the good and evil characters. We then started to develop our ideas for our own villain characters. We decided who we would be writing about and gathered words and phrases to describe them. We wrote character studies too. We have then learnt about the writers knowledge used within the text. We focused on fronted adverbials, using the correct verb form, rhetorical questions, the use of phrases and so much more.

In our other Reading lessons this week, we have been exploring poetry based on animals. We have enjoyed learning about animals who live in different habitats and those who live in cities.

As Geographers, we studied the River Thames. To begin with, we recapped our river vocabulary including meander, mouth, source, and we then looked at the location of the source and mouth of the River Thames. We were surprised to find out how the river changed over the course of the river. We used our digimaps tool to look at the route of the river and zoomed in and out to show the river a various scales.

We have really enjoyed spending two lessons this week learning about Chinese ink wash. We learnt about how Chinese ink wash paintings are made and then had an opportunity to experience this for ourselves. Using inspiration from different artists, we created our own paintings based on either landscapes, birds and plants or figures.

In our HeartSmart this week, we continued to focus on the message of 'Fake is a Mistake' which was introduced to us in worship. We thought about how telling lies doesn't show people our true self. We played a game of two truths and a lie to represent this. We then spent time to reflect on our own individual qualities which make us unique. We recorded these inside a drawing of our hand. 'Love takes no pleasure in evil but rejoices over the truth.' 1 Corinthians 13:6.

In our PE lessons this week, we have enjoyed taking part in athletics activities.

This week, we completed our RE unit from last term. We focused on how other faiths believe in forgiveness. We looked at key statements from each religion and how these were similar and different to Christian faith. We also completed our questfulmap for this term.

We started our new history unit this week. We learnt about where China is on a map of the world as well as taking a closer look at China as a country. We learnt about key features of China which we will learn about throughout our unit. We then went on to learn about when the Shang Dynasty came in our timeline of History.

In our science lesson this week, we also started our new unit of digestion. We started by thinking about what we already know. We then moved on to learn about the functions of the digestive system. We researched the parts and what role they play in digestion.

Maths.co.uk homework has been set for this week.

We hope that you have a wonderful weekend.
Miss Welch and Mrs Pointon