Welcome to Year 4!

This week so far: Friday 13th September 2024

Our value for this term:

Our value for this term is generosity.

This week:

English -  This week in English we have been immersing ourselves in our new vehicle text ‘Dear Earth’ which is a letter in story form. Students made a prediction based on some clues and an image from the text. We then wrote ‘spine poems’ about a forest. The children came up with fantastic ideas for our poems.

Maths - This week in maths we spent some time getting accustomed to the new maths platform Magma Maths. We have also started our new topic place value where we have looked at numbers up to 1000 and used our knowledge of place value to partition our numbers into hundreds, tens and ones. The children all did really well, getting to grips with the new way we are completing our maths work.

Science – We’ve started our new topic – Rocks and Soil today. The children had the opportunity to handle different stones, for example, limestone, slate, granite, marble and chalk. We had to describe the different stones and then carried out 3 tests. We tested the rocks' hardness, permeability and acidity.

History – We continued learning more about Pompeii. We’ve looked at pictures to find out about what life was like in a Roman town at this time. We are looking forward to our trip on Monday to the Verulamium museum in St Albans.

RE - In RE our big question this half term is ‘Why do people pray?  We’ve had a discussion, and the children explained what they think prayer is and where and when we can pray. They all agreed that it is a conversation with God and that it can take place any time of the day, and it does not matter where you are. They then identified who they think loves them and drew beautiful pictures for our RE book. Next time we will discuss ‘what is the difference between prayer and magic.’

Times tables

To start, all the children will focus on the following tables: 2, 5, 10, 3, 4 and 11. Every Friday, the children will have a timed times tables mix test. They will get 10 seconds to answer the question.

All children have different learning styles. Some are very good at skip counting for example 2,4 6, 8…. Other children might need it more visually, so display the times tables around the house. Finally, some children might benefit from learning it like a song.  We will try this in class, but you can do this at home too.

3 times tables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG8hRwH3JJM

4 times tables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMdE6ghY4CE

PE Kit Reminder: Please ensure that your child comes to school wearing their PE kit on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

School trip to St Albans: Monday 16th September.  Can all children please be at school at 8 am for us to leave on the coach at 8:30 am.  We aim to be back at school for normal pick-up time.

Bonus!!

One of the children in our class completed her own research about volcanoes and produced a little booklet which is now displayed on our Pompeii board in class. You can have a look at her booklet in the gallery section.  

I would like to encourage other children to do the same. They can also make some thing. Let their imagination go and they can present their work in which ever way they would like. I would love to see it and share it with the class and Mrs Denham.