Autumn 2
We have started this half term with lots of enthusiasm for learning! Our new class text is ‘The Lost Happy Endings’, written by Carole Ann Duffy. This story is about an adventurous, young girl who delivers the Happy Endings for bedtime stories. What could possibly go wrong in the story? We will be finding out as we continue with our learning sequence over the next few weeks.
English
We found the pages of our new book scattered around the classroom but all the text was missing! We had to work with a partner to discuss what we could see and make inferences and predictions about the story. We shared our ideas brilliantly with one another and we have displayed these on our working wall to refer back to in future lessons.
“…some were fireworks, zipping upwards like rockets and flouncing off in a jackpot of sparks high above the forest”
We focused on these words from the story this week and linked it with Bonfire Night, on the 5th November. We explored using alliteration, onomatopoeia and similes for effect before moving onto writing a draft version of our own poem. We self-assessed them, edited and improved our poems and then wrote them up neatly to display in our school hall.
We created some fantastic artwork using black paper and soft pastels. We thought about the patterns that fireworks create and used a smudging technique for effect also.
Maths
We have been learning about using written methods to calculate both addition and subtraction sums. Miss Taylor has been very impressed with our understanding with this particularly when the calculation involves exchanging and regrouping. Well done Year 4!
We have continued to work hard on recalling our times tables and have all made progress with this. Our class maths mascot, Emile, chose to go for a sleepover with Nieve last weekend as she had made particularly impressive progress with her times tables. Who will Emile be going home with next week?
Science
We have continued with our sound unit in our science lessons and worked scientifically this week. We used our knowledge of pitch to ask questions that we could potentially use as investigations. We worked in partners to observe the different musical instruments and recorded our ideas on our clipboards. We will be choosing some questions to investigate in our next lesson!
RE
We have focused our prayer time on Remembrance Day and reflected on the impact war has on individuals and their families. We created some wonderful artwork to display in our classroom windows and each wrote a thoughtful prayer that we shared during our collective worship.
Autumn 1
The children have settled back into school life brilliantly and it has been great to see their enthusiastic attitude to their learning. What a busy first half term it has been…
Maths
We have been developing our understanding of place value this half term and have embraced working with much larger numbers! We have learnt about 4 digit numbers and improved our knowledge of thousands, hundreds, tens and ones. This included applying our growing knowledge to fluency, problem solving and reasoning tasks including ordering, comparing, rounding and counting numbers.
We are all working hard to learn our times tables and are aiming high to learn these by the end of this academic year. We enjoy joining the Super Movers, on the BBC website, to practise these through singing and dancing with the different mascots. We have some fun games that we use regularly on the iPads too and have been impressing our teacher with our enthusiasm with this. Our class maths mascot, Emile, chooses someone each week that has worked hard on their times table progress, to go and stay with them over the weekend for a sleepover!
English
Our class text this half term was ‘The Day the Crayons Quit’, written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers. We have enjoyed exploring the features of this text, particularly the humour, and have been using our imaginations to bring this story to life!
At the start of this learning sequence, we found a stack of letters in our classroom which were addressed to ‘Year 4’. Our chairs had quit! We read the reasons why this happened and decided to write back to them to persuade them to come back. We wrote some fantastic letters and the following day we were happy to have all our chairs back in the classroom. Following this, we were set the task of reciting one of the Crayon’s letters from the book. We worked with a partner to memorise the words and then tried to add expression and intonation in our voices to perform these to our class audience. As we continue our learning journey in Year 4, we will be developing our spoken language and performance skills particularly with reciting poetry.
Our final piece of writing was to create our own story based on the structure of the class text. This included creating new characters, writing letters imaginatively from them and adding humour into our writing too. We have been amazing authors and illustrators producing brilliant story books! We are looking forward to sharing them with the younger children in school and having the opportunity to read our stories aloud.
RE
Our first unit in RE was ‘Creation and the Story of Abraham to Joseph’. We listened to some of the first stories in the Old Testament to learn more about Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jacob. We created some wonderful art that reflected how we share in God’s Creation and what virtues are our strengths, as followers of Jesus.
We used our creativity further to retell stories through music, drama, prayers and writing. Our favourite part of this unit was performing our class assembly to the whole school and it was great to welcome our parents in to school for this too. We performed a wonderful assembly filled with drama, music, prayer and joy.
Science
We started our unit on ‘sound’ and learnt about how sound is made and how it travels. We investigated this by creating a telephone using only plastic cups and some string. We were amazed to find the sound travelled between ourselves and our partner’s receiver. How does this happen? Ask one of the Year 4 scientists to find out more…
We developed our sound knowledge further learning about pitch and volume. We created pan pipes using straws that we had to cut to different lengths to produce different pitches. Look at the concentration on our faces!
We will be continuing with our sound topic into next half term. Check back to see how our class of scientists investigate the most effective materials to make ear muffs…
PSHE
We have been learning more about ourselves and our mental health. We identified different emotions and sorted them into positive and negative emotions. We thought about how they make us act and feel inside. We learnt about ways that we can manage feelings so that we take care of ourselves and others.
Our building learning power focus this half term was ‘Readiness’. How can we be ready to learn? We made some brilliant posters to teach others about this including having a healthy diet, drinking water, sleep and more…
We also created ‘positivity hats’ to reflect our learning about having a growth mindset. In the classroom, we are faced with new learning and challenges but we know that if we think positively and have a ‘can do’ attitude then we will learn well and have great achievements to be proud of. We are always reaching for the stars!
Art
In our art lessons we have been exploring colour and recapping previous learning. We thought about what primary colours are and took inspiration from two artists, Kadinsky and Mondrian, to create our own artwork using only red, blue and yellow.
We moved our learning on and investigated how to create secondary colours by mixing the primary colours together. We made purple, green and orange! To show what we had learnt, we had the task to create a colour wheel to show which primary colours mix together to make which secondary colour.
We will be continuing to learn more about colour, next half term, including shades and tones.
Outdoor Learning
On Thursday 21st October, we had our outdoor learning afternoon with Mrs Andrews. We got to visit our forest school area and learnt about maps, linking this to our school environment. We worked with partners to create a map of our school grounds. We will be developing our geographical skills further in topic lessons throughout the rest of the autumn term.
