Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 2
Date: 14th Sep 2022 @ 8:41pm
What a fantastic week we have had in Year 4!
In RE, we began our focus on God, David and the Psalms. Using our thinking hats to recall facts, we connected our prior learning and discussed things we already knew about the topic. Using our 4C model, we then explored the meaning of the word ‘persecuted’ and connected our understanding to explain why and how David was persecuted by Saul.We thought of others we know of who have been persecuted and became creative by outlining how David could avoid persecution.
Continuing to explore our monthly value ‘Respect and Dignity, Year 4 connected their understanding with the film, Encanto. The children explained how Mirabel emerges with a new sense of her own dignity and worth, as she discovers the miracle is her, not a gift.
Our English focus book this term is ‘Gorilla’, written by Anthony Browne. Oh, how excited we were to discover the main character in the book was a big, hairy gorilla! We took the time to explore a range of different images used in the book and create expanded noun phrases to describe and specify the things we could see. Putting our thinking hats on to support us in comprehending emotions, we began to read a poem all about a silverback gorilla and explained how the author felt about gorillas. It was fair to say, our opinions of gorillas changed after reading the poem and we are all now HUGE gorilla fans. Next week, we will recall what makes an expanded noun phrase and begin to look at how we can use pronouns and adjectives to write about a gorilla, without using the word gorilla!
This week’s focus in Maths has been Place Value and showcasing what each number is worth, within a given number. We have been working hard to break down numbers into their thousands, hundreds, tens and ones, find numbers to 1000 on a numberline and partition in different ways. Next week, we will represent and partition numbers to 10,000 and find 1, 10, 100 and 1000 more and less.
In Science, we became Minibeast explorers in search of living things in our local area. Using scientific equipment, we collected a range of Minibeasts and used magnifying glasses to take a closer look at their features. Following our exploration, we used classification maps to classify the living things. The Minibeasts were returned to their rightful homes following our lesson, as the children ensured they displayed our school value of Nurture to protect the living things.
We continue to thoroughly enjoy our swimming lessons and completing different strokes each week. We have been truly focusing on our school value of ‘Hope’ to have belief in ourselves that we are all fantastic swimmers. We even transported ourselves all the way to the USA in Geography, as we identified the different states that make up the United States of America.
This week marked Roald Dahl day and we were inspired by the fantastic story ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. In the story, George encapsulates our school value of Imagine and just like George, we are curious and creative too, so we created our very own marvellous medicine. George even inspired us to make worms wriggle and bags explode!
Thank you for such a lovely week, Year 4. Have a restful weekend.
Reminders:
- Individual school photos will take place on Wednesday 21st September. Children should wear their full school uniform.
- Recorder lessons are every Monday. Please ensure your child’s recorder is returned to school for their lesson.
- Weekly spellings are uploaded onto Google Classroom every Friday and tested in class every Thursday.
- We encourage children to bring a water bottle to school to keep hydrated through the day.