Year 4 - Summer 1 - Week 1

Date: 21st Apr 2022 @ 8:32pm

What a wonderful first week back! 

In RE, we started our new topic exploring whether all churches are the same. After discussing what we think defines a church, we then located churches around the world and those associated with different religions. Selecting our favourite six church designs, we used Google Draw to create a poster showcasing the varying buildings. 

Using place value grids, we continued on from our learning before half term to identify the place value of numbers in a given decimal. Not only did we write a decimal number in numerals, we also unpicked each part of the number based on its place value and recorded the number in words using tenths and hundreds. We then moved onto rounding decimals to the nearest whole number, remembering if the number to the right of the ones column is 5 or more, then round it up. If it is less than 5, then round down.

We haven’t fully revealed the contents of our new story ‘When the forest meets the sea’, yet, it is already an exciting mystery that is eager to be discovered in Year 4. Written by Jeannie Baker, we know so far that the book is a prize winning tale located in a deserted rainforest. We took time to explore some of the STAR Vocabulary that we will discover in the book, creating our own STAR Vocabulary dictionaries to refer back to throughout our English writing this term. Using plenty of adjectives and appropriate nouns, we then created a descriptive paragraph to describe a landscape we admired the most. It was great fun to read our descriptions to our partners and see if they could guess where our landscape might be.

To connect our topic of rainforests in Geography to our prior learning, we completed a circle map. Our circle maps highlighted facts we already knew about rainforests and indicated questions we wanted to explore further. Using a world map, we then located rainforests across the world and developed our understanding of where they can commonly be found. This included learning about where the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are found.

Connecting our learning with our Geography topic, we used oil pastels and chalks to bring our rainforest sketches to life. We recognised the importance of using different shades, textures and pressure when colours were situated together, to enable the vegetation to stand out and look 3D.

On Friday, we marked and celebrated World Earth Day by teaming up with Year 3 and National Trust Formby, to create a huge mural made completely out of recycled materials. After sorting through our waste materials, we planned our design and made Spring inspired objects to add to our mural. To further explore the importance of reusing and recycling, we loved helping Gus clean up the park using the National Geographics recycling roundup game.

Love Reading have chosen their 'top book picks' for April and May. More, highly-rated children's reads, from a variety of authors for different age ranges, are shared with us all to enjoy.

It was a delight to have you back in class, Year 4! I hope the sun keeps shining this weekend.

Reminders:

-PE lessons take place every Tuesday and Friday. Children will also need to wear their PE kit on Thursday 28th April for their Ultimate Kids activity session.

-Clarinet lessons continue every Monday. Please ensure your child’s clarinet is brought to school for their lesson.