Year 4 - Spring 2 - Week 2

Date: 28th Feb 2023 @ 10:32am

What a delight to hear that our week in school has been “One of the best weeks ever!” World Book Day, a School Trip and our very first Clarinet lessons have all added to a great week in Year 4.

On Monday, we were introduced to our new musical instruments and Mrs McCardle discussed with us the different parts of the clarinet and how we can make a sound using the wooden reed inserted into the top of our mouth piece. She showed us how to put the pieces of our clarinet together and the way in which we need to blow into the mouth piece to make a sound. Each week, we will be working hard to learn some musical compositions which we can shared with our loved ones at home later in the year.

Continuing with our focus on trust and betrayal in RE, we watched clips from popular children’s movies and discussed the times we could see the characters displaying trust or moments of betrayal. Clips included the trust Wendy had in Peter Pan when taking her first flight and the betrayal Lotso showed to Woody in Toy Story 3.

After reflecting on the daily chores the villagers undertake in the film Moana, we began to write diary entries to document their daily lives. We ensured each paragraph started with a fronted adverbial to indicate the time of day being referred to and structure our writing. We looked back at some of the STAR Vocab we learnt last week and set ourselves a challenge to incorporate our newly learnt words into our writing. Later in the week, our focus switched to writing speech and recalling the rules associated with using inverted comma’s. Next week, we will be working hard to ensure that when we are writing speech, we use a new line when a new character begins to speak.

In Maths, we have been converting improper fractions to whole numbers and identifying equivalent fractions. We made the connection that in order for a fraction to be equivalent, we multiply the numerator and denominator of the original fraction by the same amount. This has ensured we have not only been learning about fractions this week, but also recalling lots of our times tables. Next week, we will be converting improper fractions into Mixed numbers.

We were amazed by the incredible costumes on show as we celebrated World Book Day on Thursday. It was a joy to see how so many characters from our favourite books were brought to life… some personalists and characteristics were also portrayed too! We stumbled upon a damaged book surrounded by hazard tape and endless amounts of glitter streaming from the inside. We were informed that a character had escaped from the book and it was our job to find clues to solve the mystery. With out critical eyes at the ready, we hunted for clues and spent the day crossing of the suspect teachers until just one was left… Mrs Molloy the lion! We also participated in a book bingo, hunting for books in the class libraries across school to cross of our bingo cards. Books we had to find included one with a dragon, a book with a green cover and a poetry book. We definitely left on Thursday night with an increased loved for reading and an eagerness to delve into new books we discovered during the day.

To acknowledge Fair Trade fortnight, we discovered what happens to a banana before it reaches the consumer and discussed the reality of ‘who gets what’ from the sale of bananas. We were shocked at just how little workers receive and how some workers do not earn enough to meet their basic needs. On our next shop, we are keen to look at for Fairtrade labelling as we know that this is a way we can guarantee that workers get a fair deal for their work and products.

What a week, Year 4! Have a restful weekend and we look forward to seeing you all on Monday.

Reminders:

• If your child would like to take their clarinet home after their Music lesson each week, please confirm permission by returning the attached form or via the Year 4 email account (y4@tsp.sefton.school).
• Multiplication Times Tables Check Practise resources can be found on Google Classroom, alongside additional, optional Maths and Reading learning that can be completed at home.