Year 4 - Spring 1 - Week 4

Date: 31st Jan 2024 @ 9:24am

Here is a snapshot of some of this week’s learning in Year 4….

With a little help from some friends from Sesame Street, we learnt all about Shabbat, the Jewish Day of Rest. We discovered that Shabbat happens each week from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. During Shabbat, Jewish people remember the story of creation from the Torah where God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th day. Using a flow map, we sequenced the things that happen during Shabbat including family meals, prayers at the synagogue and drinking from the Kiddush cup.

It was time to write letters this week in English, showing off our knowledge of the events that unfolded in Pompeii after tremors could be felt on the ground. It has been heart-warming to see how passionate the children are about our book ‘Escape from Pompeii’ and the historical language they have used in their writing. Connecting our learning back to our speech writing checklists, we also took to the challenge of including speech in our writing. Our letter writing concluded by answering a critical question - should the children return to Pompeii? It was great to hear the debates the children formed surrounding the question and the powerful justification they wrote to support their answers.

To celebrate National Storytelling Week, we have been re-watching our favourite short films and adding our own narration to the clips and voices to the characters. Our narration has brought emotion to the scenes and enabled us to describe the journey of events throughout the film.

We grasped how to use the Bus Stop method in Maths, to provide us with a quick and efficient method for working out division with larger numbers. In this method, we placed the number to be divided under a bracket (or bus stop) to separate it from the number to be divided by. To fully understand this method, we ensured we connected our learning with our known Multiplication facts to calculate how many times a number goes into another number e.g. how many 8’s in 40. We know this method will come in useful when dividing 3-digit numbers and when solving word problems. With knowledge of four written methods to support our calculation, we were given the challenge of selecting the correct method to use to answer a selection of arithmetic calculations; we picked from column addition, column subtraction, column multiplication and our newly learnt bus stop method.

Continuing our focus surrounding volcanoes in Geography, we learnt all about the 3 different types of volcanoes and how we can identify them based on their physical features. Using Google Earth, we identified volcanoes around the world and decided whether they are a Cinder, Shield or Composite volcano.

Bench Dodgeball has been a class favourite this week. We love the new rule which allows us to catch the ball when stood on the bench to gain our place back on the team. In Science, we have investigated how to keep a bulb alight in a circuit and discovered how to connect our electrical components in order to make a motor and buzzer work. In Art, we have explored how to use a range of tones to give a drawing texture, shadows or emphasis on key areas.

Wishing you all a lovely weekend!