Welcome To Year 4!
In Year Four, we love working with the children to ensure that they have an environment where they feel safe, happy and thrive while they are with us on their educational journey. We celebrate our differences and how some of us work differently from others building well rounded adults of the future.
Our classroom is bright and welcoming making it both functional and inviting for all, where we can learn together in a relaxed, non-prejudiced, and calm environment.
Our learning themes change each term, which are set by the Black Pear Trust, and they allow us to build on our previous knowledge and make links across the different subjects to offer an enhanced learning experience. To compliment this learning, we try and organise trips for the children or arrange for special guests to come to our school adding to their cultural capital.
OUR CURRICULUM
Through our topic sessions we become experts of that field, activating and developing knowledge to become artists, athletes, geographers, historians scientists, and writers. We then use our knowledge across all subjects which helps to link the learning and consolidate our understanding.
This is me: We are launching into September with the topic focusing us; our identify, feelings and wellbeing. We think about healthy eating and how it can help us with our mental health, and we look at nourishing our mind as well as our body. We will also be looking at effective learning behaviours, families, and relationships and how they can look different for everyone.
My place, my time: We will be looking into the Ancient Greeks and their achievements and influences of the western world.; we will dive into democracy, gods and goddesses, the Olympics and the role of women. We will investigate the difference between hills and mountains and study the digestive system in humans and explore living things and their habitats in science. In RE we will be researching what the ‘Trinity’ is and why it is important to Christians.
Around the world: With the focus on Geography, we will be looking at locating the worlds volcanoes and discuss the’ ring of fire’. We will look at work by Eric Carle and consider or clothes and getting dress in French lessons. We will explore Hinduism in RE and electricity in our science lessons.
Parent Planner – Around the World
Those who came before us: A historical focus, jumping back in time to the Ancient Mayans. We will look at their achievements as an early civilisation and also analyse how they compare to modern day life. We will look into how they too influenced western civilisation.
Be the change: At the end of the year our thoughts turn to transition and life changes. We complete some sewing in textiles and study states of matter in science. In RE we consider how people mark the significant events of life linking to moving classrooms and continuing our journey into year 5.
Maths: In Maths, we learn through using concrete and pictorial resources to learn a formal method for each of the four operations. We build on our knowledge from Key Stage 1 and year 3 for other areas in Maths such as fractions, measurement, shape and statistics. We continue to develop our reasoning skills, understanding and questioning. In Year 4, we concentrate on learning all of the times tables as well as revisiting the 2, 3, 5 and 10-times tables from the previous year.
English: For English, we use high quality texts. In this we cover the four different genres to writing each term, which are writing to: inform, explain, entertain and persuade. As well as books, we can use images and video clips as a stimulus for our writing. We focus on quality writing rather than quantity, building on our skills across the year to encourage children to become the best writers that they can be ensuring that they understand that the new skill they learn is not forgotten about the next time they come to write a piece of work but built upon and included in their current work time and time again. We learn about punctuating direct speech, noun and expanded noun phrases, prepositions, possessive apostrophe’s the difference between their, there and they’re to name just a few of the many skills.
RE: In Year 4, we look at the creation story with a focus on what the Holy ‘Trinity’ is and why is it important for Christians. At the end of Autumn, we begin to explore other religions such as what Hindu’s believe God is like and what does it mean to be a Hindu in Britain today. As we move out of Spring, we then continue our understanding of Christianity further with why is it called ‘Good Friday’, what the Pentecost is and why do people mark significant events in life.
PE DAYS
We love being fit and active, building exercise into lessons as much as possible. We are able to take part in the daily mile and have two dedicated PE lessons every week. We learn about Invasion games such as handball and football as well as learning how we can use our movement to represent ourselves in Dance. We also go swimming to help us learn an important life skill which we can use in later life.
READING
Our teacher’s love books in Year 4 and we love to read a range of books that offer a variety of magical, mysterious and fearful expeditions that take our minds on wonderful adventures.
Mr Roberts loves to read biographies such as ‘Boy’ by Roald Dahl and other celebrities. He also likes to read books that stimulate his imagination creating great escapism.
In reading, we will learn how to use our expert tips to help us answer questions in each text that we read. Each lesson, we have a focus and purpose where we use a skill to look for certain things, for example, searching for clues, predicting, summarise and vocabulary checks. We also start to look at how we can identify inference in the text and answering questions in full sentences. Our Key authors in Year 4 are Ted Hughes, Roald Dahl, Alesha Dixon and Zanib Mian and in our DEAR time, we will read books written by these authors.
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Learning Applications
In school we use purple mash to excel our learning, this portal allows pupils to access a myriad of digital learning that spans the entire school curriculum