Year 4 - Spring 1 - Week 1

Date: 6th Jan 2022 @ 7:42pm

A very Happy New Year to you all! We hope you thoroughly enjoyed the Christmas festivities and made memories to cherish. We are back in action here in Year 4 and enjoying every moment of being back with our friends and learning lots of new and exciting things.

To celebrate Epiphany, the Christian feast day of celebration, we reflected on the journey the Three Wise Men took to visit the baby Jesus. We discovered the gifts they brought for the newborn King and imagined what gifts we would have brought should we have visited the baby Jesus. Focusing on our new topic in RE surrounding Jesus being the son of God, we explored a range of Bible stories to find evidence of Jesus’ authority. After interpreting authority as having power, being commanding and taking control, it was clear to see that Jesus’ authority brought peace, guidance and health to others.

By completing a jigsaw puzzle to create the front and back cover of our new book, we discovered that our English focus book this term is ‘Escape to Pompeii’ by Christina Balit. We sorted different parts of the puzzle into three categories: what we could see on the boat, things in the distance and what was happening in the water. We then discovered that we can show the different categories in our writing by using paragraphs. So we took to our books and did just that, using expanded noun phrases to describe and specify the things we could see. On Friday, we took our first look inside the book and began to unpick some tricky vocabulary to help us understand the text.

With a focus on  Multiplication and Divison this term, we spent time this week recalling our times tables, spotting factors of different numbers and spotting patterns within the times tables. Year 4 will be working hard next week to continue to find tricks and strategies to help them recall their times tables and written methods to support them in multiply two numbers. 

What a great first PE lesson we had, led by the brilliant Mr Brindley from Formby High School. We had such a great introduction to Dodgeball, learning the different techniques we could use to ensure we were ready to dodge the ball. Our dodging skills were certainly put to the test, dodging the villains and catching the saviour balls from the superheroes. We are eagerly awaiting Mr Brindley’s return next week!

We began our new topic on Sound this week with an outdoor challenge. Using only our sense of hearing, we took to the challenge of creating and A-Z of the sounds we could hear around school. We then identified that the sounds we hear are vibrations that travel through the air. 

After discovering a volcanic eruption took place in our English focus book, we connected our learning with our new topic in Geography, exploring how the Earth shakes, rattles and rolls. To help us understand the structure of the Earth, we compared it to a hard boiled egg! By dismantling the egg into its three parts we used this to help us identify that the Earth is divided into three layers: the crust, the mantle and the core.  

It has been a joy to have the children back in class and we look forward to the fantastic term we have to come. For more information on what we will be learning about this term, please click here.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Reminders

-Year 4 PE takes place every Tuesday and Thursday

-New spellings can be found on Google Classroom and will be tested next week.