Mr Cockson, Mrs Mounsey (4PC) and Mrs Carruthers (4LC) welcome you to Year 4.
We are also lucky to have  Mr Ali, and Mrs Iqbal and working alongside the children on a regular basis.
 

This year, Year Four will continue to have swimming lessons on a Thursday afternoon. They have P.E on a Monday afternoon.  Please make sure that children bring in the correct kit on these days.

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 your kit then!

Maths

In Maths, we began the Autumn term learning about place value. We have learnt how to read and write 4 and 5 digit numbers (in numbers and words). We also practised comparing, ordering and partitioning numbers, whilst incorporating real life practice into our place value work. We are trying to 'master' these areas and are applying our knowledge in lots of different ways. We also counted on backwards through zero and played games with negative numbers.

English

Our first topic in English celebrated the British authors Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. This really fitted into our topic on communities.  We have read 'The Faraway Tree' and 'The BFG'. 

Our second English topic was Nonsense/Narrative Poetry. The classes enjoy poetry a great deal, and with nonsense poetry the children enjoyed some humorous poems which they performed to the class. The children looked closely at Limericks by Edward Lear, a famous Victorian poet. They also used the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll as inspiration to write their own nonsense poem, that included some of their own nonsense words. We also improved grammar skills by using adverbs and fronted adverbials.

For our third topic, we have been looking at 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 have more than one friend as you never know when you might need them.

In January, we linked our English work closely to our topic on Ancient Egypt. We read thestory, ‘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.

Science

Understanding electricity and using it safely

Year Four have enjoyed some very practical lessons using electricity! They have learnt about completing and drawing circuits (including switches, buzzers and motors), materials that are good conductors and insulators, and how to keep safe around electricity.

States of Matter

We have all become experts in States of Matter! We have been developing and showcasing an understanding of all areas of states of matter, including how materials can change from one state to another, through a large range of simple practical enquiries.

Children participated in experiments using springs, fishing line, tuning forks, a ripple tank, some millet, plastic tubing, a wind up gramophone, straws, water, an oscilloscope, a very long stick, a bin bag and a host of unusual instruments.

They investigated:
How is sound is made?
What's the difference between high, low, loud and quiet?
What can sound travel through?
What kinds of materials conduct and amplify sounds and which materials insulate and dampen them?
How are sounds produced, amplified and the pitch altered in various brass, wind, string and percussion instruments?

We also learned how to make a variety of working musical instruments from junk and readily available materials.

Curriculum topics

Oldham in the Industrial Revolution

Communities 

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.  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.

Ancient Egypt

We have learnt about Ancient Egypt in our topic lessons. This has taken the children’s historical knowledge as far back as 3000BC and they have enjoyed discovering about Egyptian tombs and mummies. We have researched lots of interesting areas from Ancient Egypt such as hieroglyphics, Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, Pharaohs and Pyramids, as well as the importance of the River Nile.

As part of the topc, Year Four have visited the Manchester Museum. This trip gave children the opportunity to develop and apply their historical enquiry skills and knowledge of ancient Egypt. Through object-based activities, gallery work, and an encounter with the mummy Asru, pupils handled real Egyptian objects, developed their enquiry and investigative skills, interpreted evidence from mummy research, used iPads to explore and research independently and discovered how artefacts inform our understanding of this fascinating civilisation.