Year 4
Welcome to Year 4 Awesome Apple's Class Blog!
...Bringing you weekly updates on the amazing learning going on in Year 4 this year!
Notices for Summer One
- PE is on a Wednesday - please wear kit to school on this day
- Spelling tests are every Tuesday
- Pick 'n' mix homework is available every half term
- Please remember to read and practise time tables on TTRS everyday at home
Summer One
Welcome back to a new term in Year 4 and our penultimate one of the year!
We have had a fantastic first week back and started some really interesting new topics... In history we began learning about the Ancient Egyptians; in science we classified animals based on their characteristics and in Spanish we learned how to say what animals and plants require to live.
In maths we started learning about decimals and were able to represent numbers in a place value grid and say how many tenths it has! In Talk for Writing we are very hooked into our new suspense writing topic and wrote some very spooky poetry based on some scary pictures! In Talk for Reading we started our new book: The Iron Man by Ted Hughes and are very intrigued to find out what the Iron Man does next after stepping off the cliff.
We also enjoyed our first cooking lesson in DT where we learned about flour and grain. We baked some delicious fairy cakes and can't wait to do some more cooking next week! (Please ensure hair is tied up on this day)
Finally, the we were lucky enough to visit Hazard Alley Safety Centre where we had a brilliant time learning about how to stay safe in lots of different situations such as crossing a road, coming across a dark alley, someone drowning in a lake, what to do during a house fire and how to put someone in the recovery position.
It was lovely to see so many of you on Thursday for our Multiplication Check information session. We hope you found it useful and please do come and ask myself or Miss Richardson if you have any further questions. The best way to support your child is through regular practise at home, using some of the games we suggested or through TTRS. Remember our NPAT TTRS Competition starts on Monday so let's get practising!
Have a great weekend!
Miss Walters
What a great second week in Summer 1! We created some fantastic charcoal drawings in our Talk for Writing hook which we used as inspiration for some very tense and suspenseful short burst writing. We held a debate in Talk for Reading to discuss whether Hogarth did the right thing by luring and trapping the Iron Man in the pit. In maths we have started dividing single digit numbers by 10 and have also been using hundredths.
In Spanish we learned to name some habitats (el oceano, el desierto, el Artico, el campo y la selva tropical)! We used a key to classify ourselves in science and then applied this to classifying animals! We particularly loved our cooking lesson in DT this week which, though almost went wrong as we didn't have any pastry, demonstrated what fantastic chefs we are as we learned to make our own pastry and then roll and fill with jam to make some delicious jam tarts!
What a great week, see you all for more fun and learning next week!
Miss Walters
Spring Two
Welcome to the Spring Two term of Year 4! It's a short one, but we are going to pack it full of exciting learning!
This week we have enjoyed delving into our new topics, including Holy Week in RE, sound in science, classroom objects in Spanish and beginning work on our Take One Picture project. We enjoyed our 'hook' lesson in TfW where we went outside to the playground and drew boxes that we guessed a lion could fit into - we were very surprised by the answer and the fact that we could fit almost 30 children into the actual box! This will lead us on nicely to some exciting poetry and vocabulary work next week all about lions, ready to learn our model text which is about meeting a lion! We also had our first trip of the term to the library where we all chose a new book to enjoy reading at school and home!
The children very much enjoyed their first swimming lesson today and showed amazing respect and impeccable Langland Way. They are really excited for next week! Don't forget children need their swim suit underneath their uniform, and underwear and a towel in a separate bag for after the lesson.
We can't wait for World Book Day on Thursday. Please see the correspondence that came home today regarding our plans - we really hope we will see you there! For now, have a lovely weekend and we will see you on Monday!
Miss Walters
What a busy week it has been this week! It started with our Sports for Champions event on Monday which saw MK Breakers Basketball Club's very own Chris Tawiah visit Langland to deliver an exciting assembly all about his career. We then got the chance to do some exercises with him too! It was amazing!
We also had our World Book Day event this week which was an incredible day full of so many exciting activities all about reading. We read poetry, wrote our own poems, created biographies about our favourite authors, designed bookmarks, spent our WBD token in Tesco and even got to read with some of our families. We had an amazing time and all enjoyed being dressed up in some great outfits for the day!
To top it all off, we went on our local walk on Friday to visit some houses and buildings made of brick. This is because our focus painting for our Take One Picture project ('A Courtyard of a House in Delft') has some beautiful brickwork patterns which we were all keen to explore. The sun was shining on our walk and we saw some great buildings which has inspired us ready to create some brick artwork next week! We can't wait!
Have an amazing weekend and we will see you on Monday for another fantastic week!
Miss Walters
It's been a brilliant week in Year 4 this week and we can't believe how quickly it's going - we are already over halfway through the term!
This week it has been all about ART! Our wonderful artist Katie has joined us twice this week to help support our artwork inspired by bricks. We started the week off using different sizes and textures of sponges to create a brick wall pattern on large sketching paper. We were working in groups so had to think carefully about our design and how each team member wanted the brickwork to look. Today, we scaled down the size and worked individually on our own miniature easels to create our own brick walls using acrylic paint. All of our artwork was inspired by our Take One Picture focus painting as well as the brickwork we explored on our walk last week! We are having so much fun with this project!
In other news, we began our NTS papers this week and all did a fantastic job at tackling the maths test. We used all of our knowledge and maths skills from this year so far and demonstrated some fantastic problem solving and reasoning skills. I'm so proud of the children's progress so far and can't wait to share this with you at our Termly Learning Conversations on Wednesday 27th March. Please remember to book in!
See you next week for our penultimate week of Spring 2 and our FINAL swimming lesson of the term!
Miss Walters
We have had a fantastic penultimate week in Awesome Apple and can't believe we only have 4 days left of the term! It's been another fun-filled week full of amazing artwork as part of our Take One Picture project. We spent some time outside colouring over brick using oil pastels which created some beautiful brick-textured artwork. We also build lego brick walls, focusing on the structure and stability of our designs.
We have been doing a great job of innovating our class text in Talk for Writing and are excited to plan, write, edit and publish our hot task next week! In maths we are completing our fractions unit and have shown great skill in adding and subtracting fractions. We have also enjoyed reading and analysing more of Podkin One Ear in Talk for Reading and we are almost at the end of the story!
In the wider curriculum this week, we enjoyed learning another six classroom objects in Spanish and were able to say what we had in our pencil cases ('En mi estuche tengo...') We also investigated which materials were the best sound insulators in our science experiment all about muffling sound.
It was also the children's final swimming lesson of the term today and they all did a fantastic job. As it was a short term, there will be another opportunity for swimming lessons later in the school year - details will follow at a later date!
Please remember to book for TLCs next Wednesday 27th March - we can't wait to see you there! For now, have a great weekend!
Miss Walters
Well, that's the end of another half term and only two more left in Year 4! How fast is this year going?!
We had a wonderful week to finish off a really wonderful term. We finished our recounts in TfW, we completed our fractions topic in maths, and rounded up some super interesting topics in RE, PSHE and science. Our final day was well spent in our pyjamas feeling very cosy!
It was also very lovely to see so many of you at our TLCs and to show how fantastic all the children are doing in Year 4 and how much progress they've made since our last meeting.
Thanks all for your support. Have a wonderful 2 weeks off - we will see you Monday 15th April 8:40am!
Miss Walters x
Spring One
Happy New Year and welcome to Spring Term 1! We have had a brilliant first full week back in Year 4 and have kickstarted all our new units...
In Talk for Writing, we have been investigating Venice, Italy, and the play based there hundreds of years ago written by William Shakespeare, called Merchant of Venice. We wrote some beautiful poetry about Venice and some great fact files about Shakespeare. In Talk for Reading, we have begun reading The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byars – we’re very intrigued as to whether Tom is going to be happy living at his aunt’s farm for 2 months! In maths we have started learning how to multiply two digit numbers by a 1 digit number using short multiplication and, though tricky at first, we showed lots of resilience and are beginning to master it!
In the wider curriculum we started our new topic of electricity in Science and are investigating how circuits work. In history we are discovering who lived in Milton Keynes before it was even called Milton Keynes – so far we know the Romans were here after an invasion 2,000 years ago! In DT we found out what a greenhouse was and how it helps plants to grow… we are going to be designing and making a greenhouse over the coming term! We also started gymnastics in PE with Mr M and are really enjoying it so far (please note PE will be on a Wednesday from now!)
It's been a busy but exciting week and I think we are all ready for a nice relaxing weekend before another fun week next week! See you on Monday!
Miss Walters
It’s been a great second full week in Year 4! We were treated to an incredible pantomime performance of Beauty and the Beast and the children have written some brilliant newspaper reports to tell you all about it! It was such a treat and we feel really lucky to get such amazing experiences at our school!
Our learning has also been really fun too – we’ve been finding out more about the black fox in Talk for Reading; we have mastered short multiplication (including problem solving!) in maths; and in history we found out all the places that the Anglo-Saxons settled in Milton Keynes thousands of years ago. I was particularly proud of the class’ progress in Spanish this week and how much they are retrieving previously-learned vocabulary and applying it to our new unit! We’ll soon be fluent at this rate!
Wishing everybody a fantastic weekend and I’m looking forward to a great week next week. Please remember – spelling test on Tuesday and PE on Wednesday!
Miss Walters
Well, that’s the end of another super week! I can’t believe we’re over halfway through the term with only 3 weeks left!
This week, we started learning our new text ‘A Quest for Love’ in Talk for Writing. It is a journey story based on the character Bassanio from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and we have been writing some fantastic short burst writes based on the text. In maths, we finished off our multiplication and division unit and have now started learning all about area – our times table skills are definitely going to come in handy with this unit! In Talk for Reading, we are getting concerned about the ‘tragedy’ involving the midnight fox and can really empathise how Tom is feeling. We have completed some fantastic work based on this.
Our favourite wider curriculum subject this week was definitely science, as we had the chance to use wires, bulbs and batteries to test circuits. We soon realised that all of these components need to be connected together in a ‘complete circuit’ to allow the electricity to pass through and light up the bulb!
We also had a fantastic experience today during our Strings and Orchestra performance. We listened and took part in Peter and the Wolf and enjoyed singing along and being a part of the performance.
Wishing everyone a great weekend – see you all on Monday!
Miss Walters
Another update for you on a great week in Year 4 this week... We have had so much fun in our wider curriculum lessons this week! In science, we learned all about conductors and insulators and used our circuit-building skills to test different materials and find out if they would allow electricity to pass through. In history, we discovered that Milton Keynes played a huge role in World War II, and all created some great posters to share our knowledge. Now that we have spent a few weeks learning the song Lean On Me by Bill Withers in music, we went to the music room to have a go at playing the glockenspiel to the song. It was really hard to figure out our timing at first, but we all did a great job.
We finished off the week by celebrating NSPCC Number Day which was AMAZING! It started off with a huge TTRS competition against thousands of other schools, and then we got the chance to go to different classes across the school to play maths games and activities with other year groups and teachers. It was so much fun!
Next week, we are looking forward to FINALLY making our greenhouses in DT and to start innovating our text in Talk for Writing. It is also Safer Internet Day and Children's Mental Health Week, so stayed tuned for resources and information!
Have a lovely weekend,
Miss Walters
Well, that's our penultimate week of Spring 1 done - only one more week to go until February half term and we are half way through Year 4!
We have written some incredible innovations this week in Talk for Writing, using our model text 'A Quest for Love' based on Merchant of Venice to support us in structuring our own journey tales. I am so impressed by the quality of writing the children are producing and how much they are enjoying writing their own stories. We've also enjoyed finishing off our area topic in maths and are now excited to start learning all about fractions! We also finished reading The Midnight Fox in Talk for Reading and are now turning our attention to retrieval and deduction skills in our non-fiction unit about Elves!
In the wider curriculum, we made some amazing timelines in history to show how much our local area has changed since the Romans invaded in AD47 all the way to MK being built in 1967! In science, we created working quiz boards which make a circuit bulb light up if the correct answer is chosen. We had lots of fun with this activity and it helped us not only cement our understanding of how a circuit works, but also to retrieve previous knowledge from lots of different subjects to use as questions on our quizzes!
Next week, we are excited to make our mini greenhouses in DT, create our very own switches in science and write our final journey tales in Talk for Writing. But we are most excited to see you all on Monday afternoon for our Be Our Best writing event - we have lots of writing games and activities for you to enjoy as well as a chance to have a look at the children's writing books and see all the amazing work they have been doing this term!
For now, have a wonderful weekend and we will see you on Monday!
Miss Walters
Well, that's it! Spring 1 is complete and we are now halfway through Year 4! And we certainly had a fantastic final week to celebrate...!
The week started with our fantastic Be Our Best Writing Event, which the children thoroughly enjoyed. They were so excited to show off the amazing work they have been doing for our Merchant of Venice topic in Talk for Writing and playing some fantastic spelling, grammar and punctuation games online with you (don't forget to try these out at home too)! The children also produced some fantastic and hilarious nonsense poems on our poetry station as well as completing great editing work. Thank you so much to all those who came to support us!
In our learning this week we put all of our DT skills to the test to produce some amazing mini greenhouses. The children were so excited to take them home to put some seeds inside and test out their final product! We also made our very own switches in science to complete our learning on electricity.
Our fantastic week was finished off by a great Valentines disco on Thursday which involved a lot of dancing and a lot of snacks! The children and staff all had an amazing time.
So, all that is left to say is WELL DONE on such a fantastic term and I hope you all have a wonderful week off before we see you back again for Spring 2 on Tuesday 27th Feb. Relax, have fun and stay safe!
Miss Walters
Autumn Two
Well, it's been an action-packed first week back in Year 4, with so many fun activities and amazing learning!
We went on a scavenger hunt in our Talk for Writing hook, looking for rainforest animals hidden around the hall. We then researched one of these animals and discovered some facts about them, ready to use in some brilliant poetry the following day.
In computing, we asked 'what is the internet?' and, through string being pulled left, right and centre, demonstrated how 'messages' are passed from the sender, to a network switch, to a router, to another network switch and finally to the recipient. We had lots of giggles but now also have a good understanding of networks.
In science this week, we learned all about food chains and created our own using our new vocab: energy, producer and consumer. We also learned that an apex predator is at the top of the food chain because it does not get hunted or killed by any other animal!
We also enjoyed learning about rainforests in geography and were able to label our world maps to show where rainforests are located across the globe. We learned about the four different storeys of the rainforest and what plants might be found there.
It's been a brilliant start to our new term and I can't wait to share more about the children's progress with you next week at our Termly Learning Conversations. Please get booked in over the weekend and I look forward to meeting with you all.
Have a great weekend,
Miss Walters
This week, the children seem to have continued with our ‘first-week-energy’ and brought so much motivation and determination! It’s been a brilliant week – we have well and truly mastered 4-digit column addition in maths and are now busy tackling subtraction. In Talk for Writing, after spending the week innovating our model text, we are now planned and ready to write our own explanation leaflet next week. We have been busy investigating lots of extracts in Talk for Reading and are fascinated by the children’s first wish from the Psammead – to fly!
We also had a really fun science lesson where we discussed our diets and how it important to keep our teeth healthy and clean. We left eggshells (which have a similar structure to the enamel on our teeth) in four different liquids (milk, cola, orange juice and water) and are busy observing what happens to the egg shells daily. We also thought about stereotypes in PSHE and how we can sometimes make assumptions based on how other people look – and that, most of the time, these assumptions are not accurate! And in Spanish, we started our new topic ‘Me Presento’ (Presenting Myself) and I was really impressed by how much vocabulary the children could recall from last year when they learned greetings.
Thank you for all those who took the time to come and meet with me this week to discuss how well your child has settled into Year 4 and the excellent progress they are making. It was great to meet you all properly!
Now, time to have a lovely, restful weekend. See you all on Monday!
Miss Walters
I have really enjoyed this week in Year 4 and so have the children! We have completed our learning on four digit subtraction and have all done a fantastic job at mastering such a tricky skill! We wrote our explanation text in Talk for Writing and even published them in ‘leaflet form’ on the laptops! They looked very professional! We began digging deeper into Five Children and It and have really got into the role of Anthea – hot seating her character as well as writing in role as her. In Geography we have been focusing on the rainforest and the impact that deforestation has on animals, people and the whole planet. Our favourite lesson this week was definitely DT where we have, for the first time for many of us, began learning how to sew! It was quite tricky at first but we know that with more practise will come more progress! It was lots of fun!
We were lucky enough to be part of over 1,600 schools who took part in the Picture News live video assembly on Protected Characteristics on Tuesday, where we reflected on British values as well as our own school, class and personal values. We discussed discrimination and treated others equally as well as focusing on our value of the half term: ‘We Are Considerate’. The children were very mature and came up with some great ideas on how we can ensure we are celebrating differences across the school and ensuring we are being considerate and respectful to everyone around us.
Well done on another great week. Next week we will be completing some of our Autumn NTS papers and I’m excited to see how much the children have learned so much in Year 4. Please remember that these papers are less about seeing ‘what the children don’t know’ and more about me knowing where I need to support even further in our future learning! Have a great weekend and see you next week!
Miss Walters
It was a fantastic week again in Awesome Apple. All the children completed their NTS papers and they amazed me with their determination, focus and resilience. Aside from tests, we also learned our new text, Save Our Rhinos!, in Talk for Writing. We are trying to persuade people to help save endangered animals in the rainforest. In maths we learned how to use a bar model to help us understand what a question is asking. In Spanish, we recapped how to say our numbers 1-10 and are excited to learn 11-20 next week! In our PE lessons with Mr M, we have been practising our football skills, including passing, stopping and dribbling. It is so much fun! DT has also been great fun as we have been practising our sewing skills with felt, ready to make our stockings in a few weeks!
The children are very excited because in computing we have been learning how to add content to websites. We were lucky enough to help Miss Walters add to our class blog, so this week's news has come straight from the children!
Have a wonderful weekend and we will see you on Monday!
Miss Walters (and Year 4!)
Happy December!!! I can't believe there's only 2 and a half weeks until the end of term and the end of the YEAR! Once again, it's been a fabulous week of learning and fun... We've started our multiplication and division unit in maths this week and are using our incredible knowledge of times tables to support us in our work. We have finished our learning on Five Children and It in TfR and wrote an amazing analysis of the text in our hot task. We learned all about anaphora this week in TfW and how we can use this device in our persuasive speeches to make our message more memorable to the audience!
In the wider curriculum, we learned numbers 11-20 in Spanish and were able to ask and answer how old we are! In science we looked at the parts of the body involved in digestion and in geography we had a good debate about whether deforestation is a good thing or a bad thing. We finished off the week designing our stockings in DT and are really looking forward to making them next week!
Enjoy the weekend - see you Monday!
Miss Walters
It's our penultimate full week! And what a week it has been!
In Talk for Writing we researched animals from the rainforest and have began innovating on our persuasive speech to encourage people to save our animal! In maths we learned to multiply and divide by 0 and 1 using our stem sentences below:
When a factor is 1, the product is equal to the other factor.
When a factor is 0, the product is 0.
When the divisor is 1, the quotient is equal to the dividend.
When the divisor is equal to the dividend, the quotient is 1.
We also had A LOT of fun in science during our human body digestion experiment... After using our 'incisors' to cut crackers and our 'canines' to tear the banana, we used our 'molars' to grind the food together with the help of some 'saliva'. It went down the oesophagus and led to the stomach where we churned and digested the food further. The food then travelled to our small intestine where it stayed for several hours (or minutes in our case!) whilst our body soaked up all the nutrients and goodness. The 'waste' moved on to the large intestine where our body absorbed some of the water so that it became more solid, ready to be 'excreted' at the end! It was a very fun learning experience and definitely helped us to visually understand how food is digested in the body!
We are very excited for our final full week next week - don't forget we are hosting our cinema showings on Monday and Wednesday, it is our Christmas dinner on Thursday, followed by our school raffle after school on Friday! See you then!
Miss Walters
It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas! It's been a really fun week and we can't believe there are only 3 days left!
This week, a lot of our amazing units of the term came to an end. In science, we wrote up our experiment from last week and were able to use fantastic scientific vocabulary to explain how our bodies use the food that we eat. In geography, we wrote a persuasive letter to encourage people to stop destroying our rainforests. In Talk for Writing we planned and wrote an amazing speech persuading people on our topic of our choice, and in Talk for Reading we reflected on our poem 'From a Railway Carriage' and wrote a great summary about how the poet used lots of techniques to make the poem sound like a train! Amazing!
On Friday we had a lot of fun completing our stockings (almost...) and can't wait to bring them home next week once we have evaluated them against our design criteria!
There are lots of exciting things to come in our final week next week! We can't wait to see on Monday at 2pm for our Carols by Candlelight performance. We also have our KS2 disco at 4pm (bring £1 to the door!) as well as the chance to meet Santa in our grotto (£2 entry). On Wednesday we will celebrate earning our hundred square by watching a film in the afternoon and relaxing after a very long (but fun) term!
Please also note that PE next week has changed to Tuesday.
See you on Monday for our FINAL WEEK OF 2023!!!!
Miss Walters
That's it! 2023 is over! (Well, in terms of school it is!)
What an amazing term and a fantastic year so far. We finished off the term with a lot of fun - completing our stockings, creating beautiful calendars and Christmas cards, a carol concert, a disco and all finished off with a film, crackers and cake!
Well done on a brilliant term. Have a wonderful, restful winter break and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. See you all back at school on Thursday 4th January (IN PE KIT!)
Miss Walters
Autumn One
Welcome to our very first week in Year 4! The children have settled into their new year group remarkably well and have impressed me with how quickly they have picked up our new routines and expectations as well as how easy it was for them to continue following our school rules of being ready, respectful and safe. The class has made a fantastic start on their new learning and have enjoyed delving into some new topics...
In Art this week, we created some lovely pieces of work using line and stippling techniques, including hatching, cross hatching and complex hatching. In History, we discovered that Vikings used to be called Norsemen, and that they had four classes in their society: thralls, karls, jarls and the king! In PSHE, we were introduced to the Zones of Regulation, which is going to support us in learning more about self-regulation and emotional control. In Maths, we recapped our knowledge of place value and looked at the different concrete resources we can use to represent these. Then we made creatures using ones, tens and hundreds and worked out which 3-digit number we had created!
Well done to all on a really fantastic first week back! I am already looking forward to more fun next week. See you all on Monday (in PE kits)!
Miss Walters
Wow! Our first full week back at school and what a great week it was! we have been introduced to all of our new topics now and have made a brilliant start...
In science we learned about the states of matter and experimented with liquids and solids to sort objects into their correct states. In history, we learned about some of the raids which gave Vikings their reputation as fierce and violent warriors! In art, we focused on the importance of drawing the details we see in front of us and made some lovely sketches of lavender from Mrs Wright's garden.
Our Talk for Writing lessons have been full of incredible short burst writes where we have used some brilliant writerly techniques including personification, metaphor and manipulating the weather and time of day to really enhance our setting descriptions. In maths, we learned how to round numbers to the nearest 10 and 100 which, though challenging at first, the children have become masters of!
Well done on another brilliant week, Awesome Apple.
Miss Walters
This week in Awesome Apple we had a fantastic time in science investigating melting: when a solid changes state into a liquid due to increased temperature! We burned tea lights under chocolate, ice and wax and discovered that wax melts very easily, chocolate took a little longer and the wax took a long time to begin to change its state!
In our Zones of Regulation lesson we watched some clips from Finding Nemo and the children worked well to guess which zone each character was in at a different point in the film and justify their reasoning! We realised this will help us in our everyday lives if we are more attune to knowing which zone a person might be in, and therefore how we can support them.
In Talk for Writing we looked at direct characterisation, starting with a very funny game where we had to draw a character based on our partner's description! Who knew we had such keen artists amongst our class! We used our skills of description to write some amazing poetry and prose based on our very own strange creatures!
Good job everybody!
Miss Walters
What a fun week in Year 4 this week. In maths we have been finding 1,000 more or less of a number. In Talk for Writing we enjoyed our ‘hook’ where we discovered lots of objects from the past and created drama where we imagined what life be like in a different time period. We also wrote some beautiful poems about time. In Science we saw evaporation occur right in front of our very eyes when we left dishes of water over a candle, ice bath or left at room temperature. After half an hour we found that there was less water in the dish above the candle, because the liquid had changed its state into a gas (aka evaporation!)
In history we learned about Viking family life – the poor women and girls had to do all of the housework, cooking and looking after children whilst the men and boys got to do lots of handy work as well as fighting! And FINALLY we did our first lesson of Spanish and learned how to name the different ages through Ancient British history! We also learned how to say ‘I am a man from the stone age’!... ‘Soy un hombre de la edad de piedra’!
See you on Monday for another great week of learning!
Miss Walters
This week has been full of fun in Year 4. We have been busy learning our text map for our model story 'The Gas Mask' in Talk for Writing and have been practising some skills to support us in writing our portal stories next week. In maths we compared 4-digit numbers to find out which one was smallest or greatest, a skill the whole class has picked up really well!
Our wider curriculum subjects have been lots of fun too! In history we learned about the legacy the Vikings left behind and even got to write our names using their ancient alphabet! In art we learned about some famous artists and analysed their paintings of the rainforest, which we are going to use to inspire our own rainforest art next week! Finally, in science we created bar charts on Purple Mash to present our results from our evaporation experiment!
Overall another amazing week! Next week it is our school Harvest assembly - we are performing a rap so if children have any caps/sunglasses they could bring in that would be amazing (but only if you already have them lying around at home!!!!)
Have a lovely weekend,
Miss Walters
Wow - our penultimate week done and only one more to go before a well-deserved week rest!
We've done a fantastic job at innovating our portal stories in Talk for Writing lessons this week and are really excited to put it all together next week during our hot task. I can't wait to read our amazing setting descriptions! The children have also worked really hard in maths, rounding numbers to the nearest 1,000 (we are EXPERTS now!) and counting in 25's. We have really dug deep in Talk for Reading too and are drawing so much meaning from the words and pictures in our story by Anthony Browne (Voices in the Park).
In science we put all of our knowledge from the term together and applied it to our understanding of the water cycle. In art we created some beautiful final pieces using inspiration from the Amazon rainforest. In History we created some great fact files using the information we have learned about the Vikings this term!
The children completed their first soundcheck in our TTRS session today and have shown what incredible progress they have made in learning their times tables so far this year. We can't wait to tell you all about TTRS on Tuesday at our Be Our Best Maths Event, as well as show you some other great maths games and even let you look at some super work from our books! Please come to the office ready for a 2:30pm start in the hall. A reminder to inform the office if you are unable to make it to the event so we can arrange someone else to be with your child.
Looking forward to a brilliant final week of the term next week! Enjoy the weekend.
Miss Walters
That's a wrap! I can't believe we have already finished our first half term in Year 4. The class have made a great start at following their new expectations and routines in Year 4 and their learning has progressed so much already in 7 weeks.
This week has been a super end to a super half term. We wrote some incredible portal stories in Talk for Writing with some fantastic setting descriptions; we have mastered negative numbers in maths; and we are making great progress in TTRS.
We had our first real try at peer assessment this week too, where the children came together to edit and improve their work together. They worked very well in a team and were extremely kind and supportive to their peers!
Thank you to all those who came to our Be Our Best Maths Event on Tuesday. We hope it was informative and helpful and that you enjoy playing some of our maths games at home. It is so important for the children's skills, fluency and confidence in mathematics to get in lots of practise as well as to enjoy maths! Please also remember to encourage your child to play TTRS at home daily as this will support their multiplication fluency.
Today the children have brought home their spellings, homework, knowledge organisers and curriculum overview ready for next half term. But for now, it's time to rest and relax for a well-deserved week off! Have a wonderful time off and we will see you on Tuesday 31st October.
Miss Walters
