Year 4 - Spring 1 - Week 1

Date: 3rd Jan 2023 @ 9:23pm

It was so wonderful to welcome everyone back to the classroom this week. We were so excited to get back to our learning and catch up with our friends. 

To begin our RE topic, we explored what the word ‘authority’ means and how we portray authority in our community and across the world. Gathering photos to showcase what we know authority to be, we explained to our classroom who has authority in the world and what traits someone with authority holds. Year 4 produced some fantastic examples, connecting their understanding of people who hold power such as prime ministers and the police to even their older siblings stating that with age comes authority.

Escape from Pompeii by Christina Balit is our focus book in English this half term. Just from looking at the front cover, we were able to deduce that this story links to our Geography topic about volcanoes and the characters emotions show that a disaster is set to take place. We researched where Pompeii is and discovered that as we predicted, Mount Vesuvius is the volcano we can see on the front cover of the book. Using dictionaries, we found the definition of words we will encounter in our story that we might not have heard before and drew pictures to help us connect our understanding of the word to its definition. Next week, we will use fronted adverbials to recall the events that take place at different points in the day when we consider the life of a Roman boy.

We were introduced to Factorpillars in Maths as a memorable way to help us find factor pairs of a given number. After naming our caterpillar, we drew its face and body, before finding factors to create the caterpillar's legs. We made sure that the adjacent legs made a matching pair e.g. 10 and 2 are a factor pair for 20 and therefore would be a pair of legs for our caterpillar. Once we were confident in finding factor pairs, using dienes blocks for support, we investigated whether it was true that the bigger the number, the more factor pairs we can find. Next week, we will focus on how the place value of numbers changes when they are multiplied and divided by 10 and 100.

After creating an A-Z of sounds we can hear in different environments, we questioned where sound actually comes from. After watching rice bounce on top of a beating drum, it became apparent that the vibrations of the drum made the sound we could hear. We then went back to our A-Z sound list and identified what was vibrating in order for us to hear the sounds we noted down. In Geography, we identified the layers of the earth and labelled a cross section diagram highlighting the thickness of each layer and what it consists of.

On Friday, we acknowledged the Christian celebration of Epiphany. We learnt that the word Epiphany comes from the verb ‘to appear’. This means that the feast of Epiphany is a celebration of the time that Baby Jesus was seen by the visitors who had travelled to see him. We studied the stars and constellations, and discussed how stars were used to navigate the world and find directions. We were also thrilled to commence our outdoor and adventure activities in PE, using teamwork, diagrams and maps to help us problem solve and navigate our way around tasks. 

We are looking forward to a full week back in class next week, Year 4. Have a lovely weekend! 

Reminders:

• Year 4 PE lessons take place every Tuesday and Thursday. Please ensure your child arrives at school in their PE kit on these days.
• Spellings set before Christmas will be reposted on Google Classroom on Friday and tested next week.
• If your child is reading from the school books bands, please ensure their book is returned to school on their Reading day.