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Year 4

Mr Cockson, Mrs Shipton (4PC) and Mrs Carruthers (4LC) warmly welcome you to Year Four.

We are also lucky to have Mr Ali, and Mrs Denham-Marsh, Mrs Latham and Miss Jackson working alongside the children on a regular basis.

This year, Year Four will continue to have swimming lessons on a Thursday afternoon. They will also have P.E on a Tuesday afternoon. Please make sure that children bring in the correct kit on these days. We ask them to bring in their P.E. kit on a Monday and keep it in school until Friday.

Homework is set on a weekly basis. At the start of the year, it will be an English or Mathematics activity, spellings and times tables to learn and daily reading with an adult or older relative to share a book and talk about it. It will be given out and marked every Thursday/Friday. Later in the year, we will start termly homework where the children will have a wide variety of homework linking into their subject topics.

Please remember your reading book and water bottle every day. We may also have clubs on Mondays, so you may need other equipment then!

Our Yearly Overview

Yearly Planner.pdf

Our targets for this year:

ENGLISH

In English this half term we learning about poetry with a focus on the Romans to link in with our history topic. We will also be learning about instructions with a focus on Roman roads.

Maths

In Maths this spring half term we are focusing on knowing what a fraction is, finding fractions of quantities, adding and subtracting fractions with the same denominator, equivalent fractions and decimals.

These are the methods that we use for our calculations:

Practical Maths and Problem Solving

Purple Mash Login

English

For our first topic, we read Aesop's fables. Aesop was a Greek man who wrote fables. He wrote them because he wanted to teach people, by telling them stories. Each of these stories has a moral. That means the lesson that it teaches us. We read many fables and tried to work out what the morals of the story were. Most of the characters in the fables are animals, but with human characteristics. Despite being written thousands of years ago, the lessons still apply to our lives nowadays. We wrote our own fables, some of us using the same morals as Aesop and some making up our own. Our own morals included: Don’t judge someone by their looks; being patient pays off and don't tell lies!

A selection of our written work

For our second topic in English, we celebrated the British author Roald Dahl. We really enjoyed reading 'The BFG' and using it for ideas for our drama and writing. We have written amazing diary recounts of Sophie's journey and awesome descriptions of the scary Blood bottler. We finished off the mini topic by using the chapter on the dreams to inspire some poetry for an international poetry competition.

Some of our written BFG work:

Our third topic, took off where our last topic ended with poetry. We started off writing list poems using similes, rhyme and alliteration.

Some of our work on list poems:

Our fourth topic was explanations. We wrote about the ancient Egyptians mummification process. This was a lot of fun and we loved learning lots of gruesome facts. Why not ask us about them?

In our fifth topic, we linked our English work closely to our topic on Ancient Egypt. We read the story, ‘The Time Travelling Cat and the Egyptian Goddess’. We have looked very closely at the book and discussed the features, as well as discussing what happened in the book. We have improved our inference skills, being able to read short passages and show a high level of understanding as to what has happened. This has helped to improve our quality of writing fiction.

Reading

We enjoy daily guided reading sessions as well as lots of other opportunities to improve our reading skills. We encourage all the children to read as much as possible at home. Ideally, this will be with an adult, so they can discuss the book. We are using Bloom's Taxonomy to structure questions for reading. It would be great if these questions were also used at home too. There is an example sheet to help below.

Blooms-Taxonomy-Questions.pdf

Science

We started the year by looking at the human body and in particular the digestive system. We have looked at all the organs that are involved and the journey our food and drink goes on, inside our bodies! We even conducted an investigation using bananas, crackers, orange juice and tights to see what that process may look like! We have also looked at teeth. We discussed the types and uses for them and how to look after them. We also investigated the effect of some liquids on them.

Digestion

Teeth

Science Week - Static Electricity

Making electrical circuits in Science

Wider Curriculum Subjects

In our topic on communities, we learnt about the history and geography of our local community. We started by discussing the the rules and considerations needed to live in a community. Our English was linked to our topic whenever possible by looking at how fables were used by communities and celebrating British authors. We had a strong geography focused and improved our map work and knowledge of Oldham, Greater Manchester, the United Kingdom, Europe and the world.

We enjoyed making sure that lessons had a focus on awe and wonder, thinking for ourselves, outside learning, creativity and the use of I.C.T to enhance learning throughout the curriculum and seeing links between subjects.

Our Community topic images:

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt Morning

The Egyptians - Making Canopic Jars

Tropical World

Picture from our trip to Chadderton Hall Park

Year Four have recently visited Chadderton Hall. They took park in a fantastic orinteering course that led them all around the park. They really enjoyed observing the River Irk, the Rochdale Canal and some local wildlife whilst undertaking their geography fieldwork trip.

We have all watched a presentation about becoming Internet Legends. 'Be Internet Legends' empowers children to use the web safely and wisely, so they can be confident explorers of the online world. We have discussed what we learned and will be working throughout the year on keeping ourselves safe online. We rake E-safety very carefully, and we refer to in throughout the year in a lot of our lessons. Why not follow the link below to explore a game and discover more about E Safety?

E-Safety

Explore Interland again here to help you to become an Internet Legend

Spanish

In our first term, we concentrated on learning lots of greetings. We have enjoyed the opportunity of singing lots of songs, a visit from Spanish students and a Spanish Culture afternoon.