Year 4 Team: Miss S McVey (Class Teacher), Mrs McRae (Class Teacher) Ms V Coates & Miss C Rawlinson
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Year 4 - Autumn 2 - Week 5

Date: 30th Nov 2022 @ 11:15am

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It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

We arrived to school on the 1st December to find our classroom full of festive decorations and a cheeky little elf hiding amongst our tree. With lots of deliberation and a few clues spotted around our room, we identified that the elf’s name was Sparkle and she had been awake all evening bring festive joy to our classroom. Excitement filled the room when we discovered a note from Sparkle informing us that she had left the North Pole and made a new home in our classroom this Christmas. She informed us she will be on her best behaviour, if she can become part of our class. In typical Year 4 TSP style, we welcomed Sparkle with open arms.

Our festivities really took off, with a trip to the Christmas Extravaganza on Friday. We loved taking part in the various activities, spending time with our friends and singing along to our favourite Christmas songs. A big thank you Team TSP for organising such a fantastic event and helping us kick start our advent countdown in such a brilliant way.

Our visit to Liverpool Cathedral was truly incredible and supported our understanding of the symbolism of light. From learning about Christingles, to the gifts brought by the three wise men, we learnt so much about the meaning of light in such a beautiful Cathedral. We were in awe of the Cathedral’s size and beauty. After finding a deserted fire, alongside some lost belongings, we discovered that shepherds had left their sheep in the hills to head to Bethlehem to see the new born King. After admiring the incredible stained-glass windows in the Cathedral and the bible stories that are told through the windows, we got the chance to make our own window to represent The Nativity Story. We all left eager to visit the Cathedral again!

It was time to recall the 9’s, 7’s and 11’s in Maths, identifying numbers that are within each of these times tables and connections we can make to support our understanding. We applied our knowledge to problem solving questions, completed a dominos activity to connect questions with their answers and even played board games with our friends to test our times tables knowledge. Next week, we will be focusing on the 12 times tables, looking at what happens when we multiply and divide a number by 0 and 1 and also using the smile method to support us when multiplying 3, one-digit numbers.

In English, we ensured our sentences were using the correct tense throughout and verbs were used to describe the movements and actions of animals in a circus. We critically looked at how we spell words with the ‘ed’ and ‘ing’ endings, forming a table of evidence to suggest the rules associated with adding these endings to given words. Later in the week, we took a look back at the events that have taken place so far in out story Leon and the Place Between, before mapping the events out on a flow map. Next week, we will look at the key features of diary writing in a modelled text, before planning our own diary entries.

Have a wonderful weekend, Year 4!

 

Reminders:

  • Santa Dash takes place on Thursday 8th December. Children are to come to school wearing suitable Mufti clothes to complete the Santa Dash in. Children can bring festive accessories or costumes to get changed into and race in.
  • Our Christmas Jumper Day takes place on Friday 9th December. We look forward to seeing all the festive jumpers in class.

Year 4 - Autumn 2 - Week 4

Date: 23rd Nov 2022 @ 5:03pm

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Another great week in Year 4!

In RE, we connected our understanding of what light means to Christians with the song ‘My Lighthouse’. We took the time to reflect on what the lyrics in the song mean and how they can support our understanding that Jesus is the light of the world. Connecting to our Collective Worship value of Peace, we enjoyed a calming and peaceful Yoga session with Dom from Active Sefton, recognising the importance of Mindfulness and taking a moment to ourselves.

We are thoroughly enjoying reading ‘The train to impossible places’ by the fantastic Peter Bell, as part of our Guided Reading lessons. This fast-paced fantasy adventure is supporting our prediction, retrieval and inference skills. When writing, we are enhancing our sentences with the use of verbs and adverbs and utilising a range of subordinating conjunctions to join two sentences together. We even played our own version of Scrabble this week, connecting our knowledge of sounds to create words from a selection of letters. This game really did help us to remember the importance of sounding out and breaking down our words into their smaller sounds.

Our focus continues to be on the times tables in Maths and how we can call upon our times tables knowledge to support multiplication and division calculations. Using our critical thinking, we discovered similarities and differences between the 3 and 6 times tables, completed times tables wheels to recall the 8’s and even spotted how arrays can support our understanding that division is the inverse to multiplication. Next week, we will look at multiplying a number by 1 and 0 and also what happens when a number is divided by 1 or itself.

In Year 4, it is our mission to nurture our world and in particular, our community. To support our wishes for a more environmentally friendly word, we attended a Christmas Recycling Assembly delivered by Mersey Recycling Discovery Centre. This assembly reminded us of key messages surrounding the impact of packaging at Christmas time and ways to make small changes that can make a big difference.

Our Scientific vocabulary vastly expanded this week, as we discovered what the Digestive system was and the purpose it has in our body. In Spanish, we learnt how to talk about our brothers and sisters, remembering the all-important Spanish difference we need to make when referring to a man or a woman. Our Swimming lessons have sadly come to an end, but the improved stamina and fitness we have gained has been beneficial in our Fitness lessons this week. We completed a range of fitness tests to gain our personal best score and we are determined to use our school value of Hope to beat our PB next week!

Have a lovely weekend, Year 4! Keep shining!

 

Reminders:

  • Year 4 School Trip takes place on Tuesday 29th November. Children will need to bring packed lunch and water bottle in a disposable bag.
  • As the colder days are upon us, please ensure your child brings a coat, gloves or any other winter accessories to keep them warm whilst enjoying their breaktime.

 

Year 4 - Autumn 2 - Week 3

Date: 15th Nov 2022 @ 9:43pm

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With so many events to celebrate and recognise this week, it sure has been a busy one!

We arrived to school ready to celebrate Kindness Week on Monday, following a delightful weekend showcasing out Kindness Video to our loved ones at home.  With the understanding that this week marked Kindness Week, Anti-Bullying Week and also Children in Need, we knew spreading kindness was our top priority throughout our week.

We love to nurture others in Year 4, so this week we decided to spread kindness in the community by donating our unwanted toys, games and books to Barnardos Children’s Charity. Following our final swimming lesson, we headed into the village to deliver our donations and we overwhelmed by the grateful response we were given by the volunteers in store. We are thrilled to see our unwanted items displayed on the shelves, ready to be purchased and given to a loving home. We truly hope our donations bring joy to other children in our community.

A big thank you to BBC Teach for a fantastic Anti Bullying Live Lesson on Monday. We completed three activities, with the support of some famous faces, to understand who we can reach out to if we see signs of bullying and the importance of nurturing others. On Friday, we arrived at school in our Pudsey ears in aid of Children in Need. After designing our own Pudsey eye patches, we reflected on those less fortunate than us and the gratitude we have for the lives we live.

It was also Road Safety Week, so we popped down to visit our Reception class and teach them the meaning of some of the road signs we have been learning about. We did a fantastic job of policing the pathways, as Reception headed out onto the playground on their bikes and scooters, following the road signs we had put in place.

The children have worked extremely hard this week to complete assessments to showcase their learning so far this term. Our school value of Hope was certainly achieved by all as they tried their best and were determined to complete their assessments to the best of their ability.

Our Spanish knowledge is greatly developing with the understanding of how a phrase changes to suit a male or female person, we have developed different aspects of fitness by completing fitness challenges in PE and even enjoyed a fun lesson in the pool to celebrate the achievements in our swimming lessons in Year 4.

We are excited to welcome the Book Fair back next week. Don’t forget the fair will run from 24.11.22 to 29.11.22 and we encourage all to go and see the delightful books the fair has to offer.

Please also find attached to this blog, a parent information booklet regarding the Year 4 Multiplication Check which will be conducted in June 2023.

 

Reminders:

  • Our swimming lessons have now come to an end, but our PE lessons continue to take place on a Tuesday and Wednesday.
  • As the colder days are upon us, please ensure your child arrives to school with a coat to wear on the playground.
  • Weekly spellings continue to be uploaded onto Google Classroom every Friday and tested the following Thursday.

Year 4 - Autumn 2 - Week 2

Date: 7th Nov 2022 @ 3:53pm

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What a wonderful week we have had in Year 4!

We connected our Collective Worship value of Peace with Remembrance Day this week, as we created a WW1 newspaper article background and lay a mosaic poppy to rest on our created backgrounds. We then discussed how the poppy is a sign of both remembrance and hope for a peaceful future. It was an honour to join Year 5 at the Memorial Cross at St. Peter’s Church to observe two minute’s silence and lay the wreaths created by the classes at TSP.

In English, we have been focusing on ensuring we are using the correct tense in our writing and selecting whether it is best to use ‘was’ or ‘were’ in a range of sentences. Using a thesaurus, we located synonyms to uplevel our writing and focused again on the importance of precise detail to give the reader a detailed picture of the environment and characters we are writing about. We thoroughly enjoyed illustrating the high street outlined in our text ‘The shop from nowhere’, only able to draw what was heard in the given descriptions. Inspired by this text, when then designed our own, writing a descriptive piece to detail the shops that made up our high streets. Next week, we will be focusing on using an adjective and an adverb to describe the appearance of movement of different acts in the circus.

With the understanding that we can calculate area by counting the squares inside a shape, we took to drawing our own shapes this week. With a coloured pencil in hand, we carefully coloured the desired numbers of squares to form a shape with a given area. We later moved onto comparing the areas of shapes before designing our very own Area Robots. We loved asking our friends to calculate the area of different parts of our robot’s body. Next week, we will be focusing on the 6, 8 and 9 times tables and learning so catchy songs to help with our recall of multiplication facts.  

Using some real life teeth moulds, we identified the names and functions of teeth in Science and even showcased our missing teeth along the way! In PE, we completed different exercises as part of our circuit training session. With the music loud and our bodies raring to go, we took to the challenge of holding our exercises for as long as we could to really challenge and strengthen our muscles. We noticed the effects exercise had on our bodies and recorded our findings. In History, we created a conscious alley, to give our opinions on why Claudius should invade Britain and used our knowledge of feminine and masculine spelling in Spanish to distinguish sentences.

Love Reading for Kids have released their early November newsletter. This includes a first look at their Christmas Books and Gift Guide which is full of great ideas for all readers. Books really do make the best presents so please do take a look!

Have a lovely weekend, Year 4!

Reminders:

  • Year 4’s last swimming lesson is Wednesday 16th November. Following this, PE lessons will remain on Tuesday and Wednesday. Children should continue to come to school in their PE kit on Tuesday and Wednesday.
  • Donations to Barnardos Children’s Charity, as part of our Kindness Project, should be in school by Wednesday 16th November.

Year 4 - Autumn 2 - Week 1

Date: 1st Nov 2022 @ 10:11am

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We are back, ready to start the new term ahead and we sure are having fun!

Our week began with a look at our new Collective Worship monthly value of peace. We took the time to think about what peace looks like and times when we feel at peace. Using the Google Classroom Drawing app, we created a picture collage of our ideas to symbolise what peace looks like to us and also how peace can be seen in the Christianity religion. With the knowledge that Jesus is the Light of the world, we unpicked how Jesus brings light to our world and what support and guidance Jesus brings. We popped our ideas into a candle, with a bright flame to represent the idea of light being brought into our lives.

Connecting our understanding of negative numbers, this week in Maths we completed missing number sequences spotting the numbers needed below zero. Our attention then turned to Word Problems, with a focus on problems that required us to count backwards to numbers below zero. Later in the week, we were introduced to Area and what Area is by measuring the surface area of objects in our classroom, using squares. We learnt that to measure Area in Year 4, we simply count the squares inside a given shape or object. Next week, we will be focusing on drawing our own shapes with a given area and connecting our understanding of arrays to support measuring area in a quick and efficient way.

In English, we had an exciting morning at the TSP Circus. We used our sense to stimulate some fantastic ideas for our creative writing, linked to our new book ‘Leon and the Place Between’. We learnt about the importance of using adjectives in our writing so our readers can understand just what it is like to visit a circus and can grasp what the atmosphere is like. By using a double bubble map, we were able to showcase adjectives to highlight the similarities and differences between two images of a circus tent. Laughter filled the air as we played a game of truth and dare, to help us understand what dare Leon might be undertaking as the sign appears in our story asking ‘Do you dare to go to the Place Between’. We made some great predictions about what the Place Between might be and next week, we will create a survival guide for anyone who dares to visit.

A big thank you to Dom from Active Sefton, as we had a fantastic Health Habits session. We looked at the importance of eating a balanced and healthy diet and what that might consist of. We also had fun this week exploring different ways of meastering our times tables. We showcased amazing teamwork, enjoying the games and challenges set up in our classroom to help us develop our times tables recall.

There is no doubt that this week has been the best so far, as we filmed our Kindness Week Video. From gelled hair to space buns, our hairstyles brought the 90s theme to life as we sang, danced and raved throughout the week to some classic 90s songs. We can’t wait to see our joyful efforts be brought to the screen next week when our video premiers.  

Rest those dancing feet this weekend, Year 4 and get ready for our Kindness Video premier next week!

Reminders:

  • Year 4 PE lessons continue to be on a Tuesday and Wednesday (Swimming).
  • Year 4 Kindness Week Project donations to be in school by Wednesday 16th
  • Please ensure your child returns their Reading books to school on their Reading day.
  • Spellings will continue to be posted on Google Classroom every Friday and tested in class the following Thursday.

Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 7

Date: 16th Oct 2022 @ 5:19pm

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They say time flies when you are having fun and hasn’t it done just that!

To reflect on our RE focus this term, we outlined the main roles and responsibilities we have discovered David held from reading about him in Psalms and Bible Stories. He sure was a busy man! In Collective Worship, we took a look back at all we had achieved during the term and discussed what enabled us to reach those milestones and continue to do our very best. We explained how the things and people who support us in life are the most powerful assets we can have and those we are truly thankful for.

To beautifully display our writing this term, we spent time illustrating our own take on the Gorilla story in our Author Books. Year 4 created wonderful illustrations of the Zoo gates in which Hannah entered in our story ‘Gorilla’ as she visited the Zoo for the very first time. Using our very best handwriting, we then copied our writing around our illustrations. It was a joy to see the happiness on the children’s faces as they admired their writing.

What a great afternoon we had exploring and recreating Andy Warhol’s blotted line technique and his celebrity artwork. We showcased how we can use vibrant colours to create an eye catching design and how our colour choices can make a recurring pattern look different each time. 

Our Spanish lesson was a spooky delight, as we entered the Language Angels escape room and tried to free ourselves from the haunted house by learning and recalling Spanish words and phrases. Thrills filled the air as children began to discover keys and learn new Spanish words for the spooky festive period.

A huge thank you to Unite, Formby for our Self Defence session this week. The session enabled us to learn some basic self defence, including how to release from grabs and demonstration to different defence techniques. We were also thrilled to attend the TSP Glow in the Dark Disco this week. It truly was an incredible event enjoyed by all. Thank you Team TSP!

A reminder that spellings for the first Thursday back after half-term are on Google Classroom. Attached to this blog is also the Year 4 Virtual Classroom which has links to various websites that can further support home learning. The pupils' individual passwords can all be found on Google Classroom.

Year 4, you have been a delight to teach this term and it already feels like we have spent a lifetime together. Have a wonderful week and we look forward to hearing all your exciting news when you return!

Reminders:

  • School will resume on Monday 31st October.
  • PE lessons will continue to be on a Tuesday and children should continue to come into school ‘beach ready’ for swimming every Wednesday.
  • Recorders will continue every Monday. Children should continue to bring their recorder to school for their lesson.

Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 6

Date: 12th Oct 2022 @ 9:38pm

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A very busy week here in Year 4!

Continuing to reflect on our monthly value of Generosity, in Collective worship this week, we created a Generosity Tree. On a green leaf, we recorded a way in which we can be generosity to those in our school and in our community and pledged to do all we can to ensure our generosity benefited those around us. We reflected on our gratitude poster and reminded ourselves have we can show gratitude for the generosity we receive. In our RE lesson, we took the time to look at different Psalms and reflected on the Christian values and meaning shown. We discovered that the Lord is like a shepherd, he is our guiding light and helps us to make the right choices.

In English, we recapped our understanding of speech from last week, ensuring we understood the rules of creating a speech sentence and the punctuation needed. We then began to plan our very own Gorilla stories, replacing the characters, setting and plot with our very own, imaginative ideas. Consideration was made in our plans as to which fronted adverbials, speech sentences and adjectives we would use in our stories. As the week progressed, we began to write our stories in broken down steps and we look forward to finishing this next week before writing our stories in our Author Books.

We reminded ourselves of how to set out column addition this week, remembering the useful method to help us add two, four digit number. The children worked hard to ensure two lines were drawn to represent a doormat that the addition ten would sit under, ready to be added to the next column. We also loved using the LBQ website to conclude our coverage of Place Value and to see how our knowledge could be applied to help us solve Place Value problems. Next week, we will use the column method to help with subtraction calculations.

It was a delight to start the week by celebrating Hello Yellow Day! It brought so much joy, happiness and positivity to our week and we were delighted to design our very own positivity flags to be placed on the TSP positivity pathway. Our flags were full of positive and motivational messages, alongside uplifting pictures to bring joy to all at TSP.

In recognition of International Walk to School Month, we created a human bar chart representing how we travel to school. Reflecting on our results, we changed our bar chart to represent how we could travel to school to improve our environment. Connecting our understanding surrounding Martin Luther King, we concluded the week with a recognition to Hate Crime Awareness Week by symbolising with handprints how we are all equal, no matter the colour of our skin.

Keep shining, Year 4!

Reminders:

  • The School Disco will take place on Thursday 20th
  • On Friday 21st October we finish for half term.

Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 5

Date: 4th Oct 2022 @ 10:53am

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Year 4 have SHINED this week!

Having unpicked what our new Collective Worship monthly value of generosity is, we read the story of the Rainbow Fish. As a class, we outlined the ways in which the fish shows generosity and connected the story with our own experiences of how we share generosity in our daily lives. Taking a black and white fish, we then noted how we could add colour to the lives of others and make our world a Rainbow world. Taking on the role of David, we defeated Goliath in our RE lesson. We tennis balls at the ready, we took aim at our Goliath targets and shouted out the Christian values that David displayed when defeating Goliath.

Taking on the role of Hannah in the story ‘Gorilla’, this week we wrote diary entries to express to the reader the events leading up to Hannah’s birthday in the story. Our writing was full of fronted adverbials to specific when, where or how an event took place, and we used the first person to write as if we were Hannah. We also discovered that Macaroni makes the perfect speech marks, as we used the pasta to symbolise where speech marks should go in a sentence. Next week, we will begin to plan and write our own interpretation of the story, Gorilla. This story will include features of writing that we have focused on this term.

We revisited Roman Numerals to start the week in Maths, recapping the numeral for 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100. We were quick to discover that the sequence on numerals impacts on whether we add or take away a number. It was then time to show off our knowledge of rounding to 10, 100 and 1000, working hard to use a number line to support our thinking. We love using rhymes to help us remember facts in Year 4, why not ask us to perform the Roman Numerals song or even our handy rounding rhyme at home. Next week, we begin to look at adding and taking away numbers and the formal methods we can use to support our calculations.

Lots of strategic work in Basketball this week, as we played using just one basket for both teams to shoot in. We had to work hard to activate our ball whenever we intercepted it. In swimming, we continue to thrive, practising a range of strokes and developing our breathing technique when swimming longer distances. Vertebrates and Invertebrates were the focus in Science, as we categorised different animals to show whether they are an animal with or without a backbone.

To celebrate Black History Month, we focused on Martin Luther King and watches his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. We then created dreams of our own, to ensure our future world is peaceful and full of equality. Year 4 certainly have showcased our school value of Enjoy this week. We were thrilled to start our Mini Marathon, in support of the incredible people who ran the London Marathon. Even after 4 laps, we were still determined to keep going and run some more!

We hope you have a wonderful weekend and look forward to seeing you on Monday, Year 4!

 

Reminders:

- The Year 4 virtual classroom can be found on Google Classroom and is attached to this blog. This outlines additional learning and links to websites we use in school, that your child can engage with at home.

- Year 4 PE days are Tuesday and Wednesday. Please ensure your child arrives to school wearing their PE kit on these days.

- As the colder weather sets in, please ensure your child brings a coat to school.

- Details on how to access your Parent-Teacher Meeting will be sent on Monday 10th October.

 

Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 4

Date: 28th Sep 2022 @ 4:14pm

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The colder days might be upon us, but it hasn’t damped our spirits.

To kick start our week, we attended our Harvest assembly, led by our fantastic Year 5 class at St. Peter’s Church. We supported Southport Foodbank with our donations, accompanied Year 5 by singing some beautiful hymns and took the time to show gratitude to God and those around us for the things we are grateful for.

In English, we took a moment to pause and reflect on some of our misconceptions, to help us improve our writing. Using our creativity, we make tricks and tips to help us remember whether to use their, there or they’re and also revised when and why an apostrophe is needed. Looking back at our story ‘Gorilla’ to revisit the pages we have read so far, we used a Flow Map to outline the main events that have took place in the story. We then began to plan a diary entry for each of the main events, using expanded noun phrases to add detail and fronted adverbials to inform the reader of when the events took place. Next week, we will be learning the rules for adding speech into our writing and ensuring every sentence we right has the correct punctuation.

After researching the mountains in the UK, we ordered their heights to demonstrate our ability to order numbers to 10,000. We also used our knowledge of greater than and less than, to compare different numbers whether they were shown pictorially or in written words or numbers. We encountered a Roman in our Maths lesson this week, who helped us to march around the classroom reciting Roman numerals and we even learnt a song along the way to help us remember them! Next week, we will recap rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000 before moving onto formal methods of adding numbers.  

We were thrilled to drop everything on Monday and Tuesday and take part in our very own school Read-a-thon! Over the course of two days, we ensured that we filled our Read-a-thon session with books we loved to read and discussed various authors who bring some of our favourite stories to life. The Epic Books website allowed us to even discover books we had never read before and listen to Audio books being read aloud to us.

To celebrate European Languages Day, we discovered how to say hello in different languages all around the world. Using an Atlas, we located the countries on a World map, before matching thr country with how they say ‘hello’ in their language. We were also really grateful to Sarah from Kids Lingo UK who visited to help us improve our own Spanish language skills.

It is no secret that we love animals in Year 4! This meant that our Science lesson this week was full of excitement as we continued to classify living things into groups. We used a Venn diagram to organise different animals into those that breathe air, those that live in water and those that lay eggs. We soon discovered that if all 3 statements were valid, the animal belonged in the area where all the circles met. We comprehend the diagram to discover that just like us, whales and dolphins are mammals because they breathe air and have a backbone.

It was time to start the Mini Marathon this week, in which we will be running 13 laps of our school field in support of the London Marathon. Whether we walk, jog or run, we will work as a team and encourage others to push on and keep going!

We have loved every moment of our week together, Year 4. Have a great weekend.

 

Reminders:

- Parent-Teacher Meetings go live on Monday at 6pm. Please use School Spider to book your appointment slot.

- As the colder days are upon us, please ensure your child brings a coat to school for playtime.

- Reading journals are to be brought back to school each week on your child’s reading day, alongside their reading book.

Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 3

Date: 21st Sep 2022 @ 7:30pm

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What a wonderful week here in Year 4, filled with so many exciting learning opportunities!

In RE, we read about how God chose David to be the new king, after Saul let God down. We learn that God rejected him because he does not judge as people judge. People look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. We comprehended what God saw in David’s heart and recognised that lots of our school values were values that David held.

Continuing to explore our monthly value ‘Respect and Dignity, Year 4 watched a short clip about Singa and the kindness cubbies. On the way to Kindsville Park for Tosh's new rocket launch, the cubbies met Loewe, a school bully. We deduced what had happened on the way that made Tosh learn about accepting people for who they are and treating them like how you want them to treat you.

Continuing our English focus book ‘Gorilla’, we created expanded noun phrases to describe different images in the story. Our sentences included a determiner, two adjectives and a noun. Of course we didn’t forget to put a comma between our adjectives. Later in the week, we explored pronouns, identifying different words we could use instead of writing ‘gorilla’ in every sentence. Beast, ape, monkey and king of the jungle were all great ideas we came up with! With some knowledge of what a fronted adverbial is, next week, we will be writing facts about gorillas using fronted adverbials.

In Maths, we continued our focus on Place Value. We thoroughly enjoyed our football place value lesson, passing the ball through the thousands, hundreds, tens and ones goals, to represent the value of each digit in a given number. We were creative in finding multiple solutions to place value problems and continued to identify different points on a number line to 10,000. Next week, we will use our black thinking hats to help us recall facts about rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000 before comparing and ordering numbers to 10,000.

Following our exploration last week in Science, we used classification maps to classify the minibeasts we discovered and explored a range of plants to classify too. We created fact files for selected stated in the USA and used a blotting technique in Art, to recreate the work of Andy Warhol. Our basketball skills continued to develop as we guarded the ball when dribbling and we learnt how to tell someone our name and nationality in Spanish.

We were proud to support Jeans for Genes today, by decorating pairs of jeans with fabric crayons, paints and plenty of glitter! We are overwhelmed to have been tweeted by the charity themselves, who described us as ‘happiness makers!’ On Friday, we also joined the fantastic Dame Darcey Bussell for a virtual dance along in support of National Fitness Week. Our dance movers were certainly enough to rival the Strictly Come Dancing dancers.

Enjoy your weekend, Year 4. See you on Monday!

 

Reminders:

- Our Read-a-thon takes place next Monday and Tuesday, in class.

- Weekly spellings can be found on Google Classroom.

- Children should return their reading book to school every week on their Reading day.

Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 2

Date: 14th Sep 2022 @ 8:41pm

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What a fantastic week we have had in Year 4!

In RE, we began our focus on God, David and the Psalms. Using our thinking hats to recall facts, we connected our prior learning and discussed things we already knew about the topic. Using our 4C model, we then explored the meaning of the word ‘persecuted’ and connected our understanding to explain why and how David was persecuted by Saul.We thought of others we know of who have been persecuted and became creative by outlining how David could avoid persecution.

Continuing to explore our monthly value ‘Respect and Dignity, Year 4 connected their understanding with the film, Encanto. The children explained how Mirabel emerges with a new sense of her own dignity and worth, as she discovers the miracle is her, not a gift.

Our English focus book this term is ‘Gorilla’, written by Anthony Browne. Oh, how excited we were to discover the main character in the book was a big, hairy gorilla! We took the time to explore a range of different images used in the book and create expanded noun phrases to describe and specify the things we could see. Putting our thinking hats on to support us in comprehending emotions, we began to read a poem all about a silverback gorilla and explained how the author felt about gorillas. It was fair to say, our opinions of gorillas changed after reading the poem and we are all now HUGE gorilla fans. Next week, we will recall what makes an expanded noun phrase and begin to look at how we can use pronouns and adjectives to write about a gorilla, without using the word gorilla!

This week’s focus in Maths has been Place Value and showcasing what each number is worth, within a given number. We have been working hard to break down numbers into their thousands, hundreds, tens and ones, find numbers to 1000 on a numberline and partition in different ways. Next week, we will represent and partition numbers to 10,000 and find 1, 10, 100 and 1000 more and less.

In Science, we became Minibeast explorers in search of living things in our local area. Using scientific equipment, we collected a range of Minibeasts and used magnifying glasses to take a closer look at their features. Following our exploration, we used classification maps to classify the living things. The Minibeasts were returned to their rightful homes following our lesson, as the children ensured they displayed our school value of Nurture to protect the living things.

We continue to thoroughly enjoy our swimming lessons and completing different strokes each week. We have been truly focusing on our school value of ‘Hope’ to have belief in ourselves that we are all fantastic swimmers. We even transported ourselves all the way to the USA in Geography, as we identified the different states that make up the United States of America.

This week marked Roald Dahl day and we were inspired by the fantastic story ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. In the story, George encapsulates our school value of Imagine and just like George, we are curious and creative too, so we created our very own marvellous medicine.  George even inspired us to make worms wriggle and bags explode!

Thank you for such a lovely week, Year 4. Have a restful weekend.

 

Reminders:

- Individual school photos will take place on Wednesday 21st September. Children should wear their full school uniform.

- Recorder lessons are every Monday. Please ensure your child’s recorder is returned to school for their lesson.

- Weekly spellings are uploaded onto Google Classroom every Friday and tested in class every Thursday.

- We encourage children to bring a water bottle to school to keep hydrated through the day.

Year 4 - Autumn 1 - Week 1

Date: 7th Sep 2022 @ 9:06pm

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Wow, our first week in Year 4 has been full of smiles, joy and laughter. We have had so much fun finding out about our new class, catching up with our friends and teachers and exploring the Disney film ‘Encanto’.

We had a magical start to our week after we spotted that our classroom door looked a little magical and our classroom was full of colourful flowers. We soon identified that our theme this week would be surrounding the fantastic Disney film ‘Encanto’. After completing a jigsaw puzzle using the clues given to us, we revealed that the film will help us to explore our school values. We recognised that our school values make us SHINE and we consider them to be more powerful than the gifts the Encanto characters have.

In our first Mindfulness lesson, we recognised that our gifts might not be visible, like those of the characters in Encanto, but we sure do have some incredible gifts and special powers hidden within our inner self. We also deduced what ‘Encanto’ means and thought about where our special place might be that fills us with joy, has a charm about it and an enchanted atmosphere.

Using one of our favourite songs from the Encanto film ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’, we dug into the lyrics for some great examples of hyperbole, similes and rhyme. We heard lots of different points of view about Bruno in the song, spotting those that do not use our school value, Nurture. We also highlighted the significance of hope in the film by a letter to the family from the view point of Mirabel stating the importance of keeping positive, trying their best and never giving up in order to restore the miracle. By wearing our very own bright green glasses, just like Mirabel’s, we certainly didn’t forget who’s point of view we were writing from.

Ready to start the year with our favourite book from our class library, we indulged in a variety of different genres in our first Year 4 Book Tasting. After tasting some samples, we selected the ‘course’ we would like to read first. We don’t have to worry about remembering what page we are up to, as we also created our own unique bookmarks!

It’s safe to say we loved using the parachute in our first PE lesson to develop our understanding of our school values. We solved problems, used honesty, nurtured with helping hands and of course enjoyed every moment with happy feet. Our first swimming lesson of the year was a great success. We are already excited for next week, ready to practise more strokes and use our school value of Hope to try our very best.

The week wouldn’t have been complete without an afternoon of crafting! Paints at the ready, we recreated the Encanto house, created Columbian inspired art and made decorations ready for our very own Fiesta next week.

It has been a real pleasure to welcome the children back this week and we look forward to making our learning journey an enjoyable and exciting year. Don’t forget to follow our Twitter account @Year4TSP to see our learning highlights throughout the week and watch out for notifications on Google Classroom.

A reminder that our PE lesson will take place on Tuesdays and our swimming lessons will take place on Wednesdays. Weekly spellings will also begin to be set next Friday and can be found every Friday from 3pm on Google Classroom.

A poster containing 100 recommended reads for Year 4 children has been attached to this blog. By providing 100 quality texts at an age appropriate level, this list may be useful when choosing your child's next book. We hope it inspires the children to continue on in their reading journeys whilst further encouraging a lifelong love of books and stories.

Well done for all your hard work this week, Year 4! We can’t wait to see you on Monday! Have a great weekend!

 

Reminders:

- Children to wear PE kits every Tuesday and Wednesday.

- Swimming lessons take place every Wednesday. Children should wear their swimming costume under their uniform and bring their swimming cap and towel in a labelled bag.

- To encourage the children to drink plenty through the day, we ask that children bring a water bottle to school with them.

Year 4 - Summer 2 - Week 6

Date: 14th Jul 2022 @ 11:12pm

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What a year we have had, Year 4! Our time together has always been full of smiles and laughter and we couldn’t be prouder of each and every one of you.

To celebrate our last week together, we filled our time with our favourite activities and took a look back at our learning from the year. We enjoyed watching ‘How to draw’ videos, copying the drawing skills and getting top tips from some great illustrators. We were delighted at how our drawings came out and how much they resembled the characters and objects we had drawn. Using lots of creativity, we also filmed our own dinosaur movies using a range of camera angles and landscape shots. Using iMovie, we then added our photos and videos to the storyboard to join the clips together and make an opening and closing scene.

Inspired by our visit to Chester Zoo, we took a look back at our photos from the trip and decided upon which animal we wished to use in our Art sketching project. With only half of an animal’s head shot printed onto the page, it was our job to complete the other half using the pattern, shading and lines we could see on the other side. Not to forget the need for the image to be as symmetrical as we could make it. We also used teamwork to design a collaborative piece of artwork, each with our own section of the image to design before working together to piece the image back together to display the finished piece.

In our Mindfulness lesson, we discovered that in the story, The Dot, a little girl named Vashti feels frustrated in art class because she thinks she can't draw.  Her teacher encourages her to make a mark on the paper and this begins her journey into discovering that you can make beautiful art with just DOTS. The story inspired us to make our own artwork, starting with a simple dot. We used the growth mindset we have developed over the year and our increased confidence in knowing we are capable of anything to make some fantastic pieces of art. What imagination and creativity we showed!

What a delight it was to watch the Year 6 Leavers Production this week. There certainly were lots of tears of pride and sadness, as we sent our best wishes for their next steps into High School and thanked them for the memories they have helped us to make at TSP.

The joy and sheer love for learning you have brought to the classroom has been admirable. The memories we have made together and the laughter we have had along the way will be cherished by us all. Thank you to all the fantastic parents/careers who have supported us all this year. Your kind words of support and encouragement really have not gone unmissed. We thank you so much for all your thoughtful gifts and well wishes and hope you all have the most wonderful Summer holidays.

We look forward to watching you all continue to grow as you head into Year 5! Love and big hugs from all in Year 4.

Year 4 - Summer 2 - Week 5

Date: 6th Jul 2022 @ 9:36am

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With the last week of Year 4 in our sights, we have had a week of memorable learning and sheer enjoyment. 

To challenge our thinking, we have been completing challenges each morning designed to make us connect our learning, think creatively and also to take a critical approach to problem solving. Using NACE challenge cards, we were given a range of clues to guess ‘Who am I’ style questions. We were amazed to discover Beatrice Potter gave lots of her land to The National Trust! Using the Spellie website, not only did we guess ‘stay’ on the easy setting but we also managed to work out ‘pickle’ on hard mode!

We are thrilled to have been visited by Sarah from our local library this week, to hear all about this year’s Summer Reading Challenge. We are all ready to take on the challenge and showcase our love for reading! We would also like to give a big thank you to our class Reading Ambassadors who have taken the time to organise our class reading corner into different book genres and add more exciting reads to our library. 

To conclude our focus on the story ‘Blue John’, we created a letter to reply to a curious caver outlining how caves are formed, the process of creating stalactites and stalagmites as well as detailing why some rocks appear to be different colours than others. Our use of technical vocabulary and fronted adverbials were evident throughout and we even included some interesting facts connected to our History topic surrounding the Mayans. 

Our attention turned to shape and space in Maths, as we gained an understanding of the three types of triangles; right angled, isosceles and scalene. We discussed what common features quadrilaterals have and the names associated with different quadrilaterals. We then moved onto describing how we can move on a grid, using coordinates to help us in plotting points. 

This week also brought Sports Day, a highly anticipated event in Year 4. From sack race, to egg and spoon race… not forgetting the hilariously funny three legged race, we bounced and sprinted our way to the finish line to win points for our house teams. We are extremely proud of all the efforts and determination showcased by all of Year 4 in every race they competed in. It was a delight to see them having so much fun with their peers and relishing from the cheers of the parents. 

Using the Goldilocks story as a stimulus, we created our own version of the story in Spanish. Using picture clues to help us and key Spanish vocabulary, we sequenced given Spanish sentences to complete the story from start to finish. 

National Book Tokens are running a competition where the lucky winner will win £1000 of book tokens for their chosen school and £100 book vouchers for themselves! Please click the link below to quickly enter and nominate our school for the win! Thank you! - National Book Tokens Competition.
 
This week the children enjoyed a visit from Sarah from Formby library who informed the children about this year's Summer reading challenge. They were all very excited! We hope they will be able to enjoy the reading challenge and celebrate this with us when they return to school in September.
 
In preparation for the next academic year, please see the Year 5 Successful Start PowerPoint attached at the end of this blog.

Have a restful weekend and we look forward to making more memories in our last week together, next week. 

 

Reminders:

-Clarinets will be kept in school and passed onto Year 5, ready for clarinet lessons next year.

-School term finishes at 1pm on Friday 15th July. 

-Please ensure any school reading books are returned to school, prior to the end of term.

 

Year 4 - Summer 2 - Week 4

Date: 29th Jun 2022 @ 4:39pm

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The best are flying by, but we continue to still SHINE in Year 4.

Our candles were lit in RE, as we wrote our own prayers for reflection this week. We ensured we considered those we wanted to pray for in our prayers and all the things we wanted to give thanks to God for.

When considering our Collective Worship value of Truthfulness, we role played the scenario of accidentally spilling paint on a gift for a friend. We thought about how we could cover the whole picture with paint to disguise the splashes and no one would notice. This then led to a discussion surrounding how lying is just covering up a mistake and the mistake is still there and will eventually be found out. That is why it is better to just own up to things!

In Maths, we have been learning how to interpret a range of graphs and use the information to answer a series of questions. We have used subtraction to find the difference in amounts, spotted the sequence in the scales used and even had a go at drawing our own graphs. Next week, we will be finding the properties of shapes and guiding our peers around obstacle courses to use the vocabulary associated with position and direction.

Our Blue John story has come to an end and we are thrilled to have read the last chapter to discover what happens to Blue John and the Queen of Darkness. We created three paragraphs to show the process the Queen of Darkness went through in order to create her precious Blue John, using fronted adverbials to help sequence the steps in our paragraphs. Next, we discovered the process that occurs in order to make stalactites and stalagmites, creating a factual diagram to help us recall the process. Our diagrams then turned to writing as we used our previous writing to support us in writing a new non-chronological report to explain the process of these fascinating cave features.

The Sefton Maths Sumdog Competition started this week and we sure did show determination to work our way up the leader board. With all children commited to the challenge, we rose to 3rd place and battled to keep our spot until the very end. Well done for all your efforts with this competiton, Year 4! You showcased our school value of Hope and some excellent Maths skills!

Although the weather put a dampener on our Sports Day plans, we still had a great afternoon researching unique sports to complete an A-Z list of sporting activities. It was amazing to find out about a range of weird and wonderful sports, some of which we would love to play! Even though we have to wait another week to compete, we are delighted to have a couple of extra practise sessions so our Sports Day performances are the best they can be.

Our school book fair is currently taking place in the school portacabin and is open from 3.05pm to 3.30pm each day after school until next Wednesday 6th July. All purchases made, result in more books for our class libraries! Please do support us if you are able to, and thank you to those of you who have supported this event already. Your support is very much appreciated.

Have a restful weekend, Year 4!

 

Reminders:

-Sports Day is rescheduled for Wednesday 6th July. Children will need to come to school dressed in their PE kits.

-Clarinet lessons continue every Monday until the end of term. 

 

Year 4 - Summer 2 - Week 3

Date: 22nd Jun 2022 @ 11:36am

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Another week of sunshine, hard work and showcasing our school value of ‘Enjoy’.

In RE, we thought about our own experiences of prayer and the times and places we had communicated with God in this way. We connected our learning back to who we pray for and identified the times where we felt we needed to pray for loved ones, those who teach or lead us and those who may be sick at this time. Thinking further about our Collective Worship value of Truthfulness, we read the Emperor's New Clothes and discussed how no one wants to tell the Emporer the truth but when someone does, it is for the better. We linked this with the ideas that many people might not want to upset someone by telling the truth.  

We were thrilled to join the rest of the school in completing a Lap of Hope on Tuesday, to celebrate the Commonwealth Games and show our support for Comic Relief. We started the morning by creating pledges for the world we wanted to see, before heading out to form a lap around the school with the other year groups. In the afternoon, we then proceeded to attend an assembly led by the Year 5 and Year 6 Sports Ambassadors to learn a little more about the up and coming Commonwealth Games.

This week we have worked on both our resilience and effort as we tackled some assessments to check our understanding of our learning so far this school year. The children should all be very proud of their dedication to their assessments this week and the enthusiasm they have shown.

Making the most of the sunshine, we completed calculation practise outside, using chalk to draw out the method we would use to solve calculations using the four operations. We certainly do love to learn outside!

On Friday, we attended the TSP Summer Fair. This is by far our most favourite event of the year and we were thrilled to use our tokens to take part in many of the stalls including tin can alley, tombola, beat the goalie and even pay a visit to some farm animals and an incredible bouncy castle. With prizes won and lots of tasty treats, we definitely ended the week on a high!

 

Reminders:

-Sports Day will take place on Wednesday 29th June. Please ensure children wear their PE kit and bring a bottle of water to school.

-Clarinet lessons will continue every Monday until the end of term.

-With the warm weather, please ensure your child brings a bottle of water to school. 






Year 4 - Summer 2 - Week 2

Date: 14th Jun 2022 @ 11:26am

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A week full of memory making and learning highlights in Year 4!

‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is one of the most famous fables and we loved revisiting the story this week to think deeper about our understanding of our Collective Worship value, Truthfulness. In RE, we pulled the Lord’s Prayer apart to analyse the different words and phrases used throughout. We recognised that the Lord’s Prayer is a Christian prayer which Jesus taught his disciples to say and each line has its own meaning. A particular word we analysed was ‘Amen’ which we deduced means ‘So be it’. We concluded that this word is a form of blessing at the end of most prayers.

In English, we continue with our story, ‘Blue John’. Before we started reading the new chapter, we explored our new STAR vocabulary, using our dictionaries to define the words and creating a glossary for future reference. We connected our learning with Geography, discovering new terms such as stalagmites and stalactites. Using Hot Seating, we explored the thoughts and feelings on the Queen of Darkness and used fronted adverbials to create sentences about her actions towards Blue John. Our learning then progressed to spotting features in explanation texts and justifying when a new paragraph should be used. 

We carried out lots of practical activities in Maths to focus on our recall of the 2 to 12 times tables. From a scavenger hunt around our school grounds, to bingo and chanting, we truly have worked hard this week to increase our recall speed. We have also begun our focus on statistics by reading and interpreting pictograms as well as creating our own, using a suitable key and symbol. Next week, we will look at line graphs and answer questions based on the data we can interpret from bar charts. 

With our Mayan masks dry and eye holes cut, it was time to add paint. Using a range of vibrant colours and eye-catching patterns, we chose whether to make a mosaic effect or to symbolise an animal as our design. Our clarinet skills are also going from strength to strength! With the focus and determination we are displaying to perfect our notes, the range of songs we have perfected is ever increasing each week. Mrs McCardle couldn’t be more proud!

The most fun we had this week was certainly when we carried out our bubble investigation. After creating bubble bands out of pipe cleaners, we dipped them in bubble mixture and filled the sky with bubbles! Excitement filled the playground as we used our observation skills to observe if the bubbles were always round, if they always went up in the air and investigated if we could create different coloured bubbles. 

As a school, we are extremely pleased to have achieved GOLD for our School Games Mark this year. This reward is testaement to the dedication and work our Year 4 Sports Ambassadors have put in to support sport and exercise across the school, alongside the other ambassadors. A huge well done to them!

 

Reminders:

-Mufti Day and the Summer Fair on Friday 24th June.

-Children will need to bring trainers to school on Tuesday 21st to complete a lap of hope around the school.

-Please ensure children have a water bottle in school.

Year 4 - Summer 2 - Week 1

Date: 7th Jun 2022 @ 4:04pm

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Year 4 have been busy bees in their first week back!

To explore our new collective worship value ‘Truthfulness’, we created a web of lies. One lie led to another and before long, it became apparent that telling lies over times created a tangled web of dishonesty. We then looked at how we can use our five fingers on ours hands to represent different people we think of when we pray. We recognised that when we pray we think about those who we love, those who teach and guide us and for those who may be sick or unwell.

In English we have moved onto a new story about the life of Blue John. From the cover, we were able to make inferences about why John is blue and what this could mean, we also discussed the ring around Blue John and what that might represent. After exploring the first two chapters, we then used our prior knowledge of paragraphing to write our own three paragraph summaries about how rain is created. This also connected our learning to last term’s Science topic – States of Matter. We ended the week with a fun interactive activity where we took to the Hot Seat to roleplay and improvise an interview with the Queen of Darkness.

We have continued to develop our understanding of time in Maths this week. We have learnt how many days are in each month of the year, remembering this through a helpful rhyme. We also started to look at digital time in more depth, recognising the difference between 12 and 24-hour time. This was achieved by using number cards to see how many times of the day we could create with just four numbers!

Our new topic in History looks at the Mayan Civilisation which is very exciting! We delved into some enquiry-based learning where we created six questions which we would like to answer about the mysterious ruins the Mayans discovered. We linked our Historical findings to our Art lesson, where we started to create our own Mayan Mask out of papier-mâché. It was interesting to find out that these masks could have been worn for a variety of different reasons and can symbolise the three stages of life.

On Thursday, we began to retell the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in Spanish. We used our craft skills to make a minibook from A3 paper where we practiced our Spanish writing, using accents to indicate stresses on the word. It was then time to get more artistic with our beautiful illustrations.

This week we were also able to develop our map reading skills in PE by learning about Orienteering. Collaboratively, we solved riddles to gain letters which would be included in the anagram which we had to figure out This was a lovely way for our trainee teachers to say ‘thank you’ for the experience they have had in our Year 4 classroom community. We also began to learn about the footwork rule in Netball, where we had to practice keeping one foot ‘glued’ to the floor and using the other foot to pivot on.

Have a wonderful weekend, Year 4.

 

Reminders:

-The children would really benefit from practising their times tables at home next week, in any spare time they may have.

-As the weather is getting warmer, please ensure children bring a water bottle to school.

-Clarinets must be returned to school for our lesson on Monday afternoons.

Year 4 - Summer 1 - Week 6

Date: 24th May 2022 @ 10:18am

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What an excellent and busy week within Year 4 to end the term!

Ahead of the Jubilee, we took the time to join the awesome Horrible Histories’ artist Martin Brown for a right royal show about great and gruesome monarchs. We loved his live drawing, silly stories and foul facts! 

After listening to our peers' speeches in class stating why they should be selected to represent Year 4 in the TSP pupil voice groups, we began the week casting our votes at the TSP Polling Station using our very own Polling cards. A huge congratulations to the nominated representatives, who we know, will deliver the pupil voice of Year 4 in their group meetings and ensure our opinions and beliefs are shared. 

This week has been full of cheers and celebrations, particularly on Friday, when we took part in the TSP talent show. Following a morning of singing, dancing, magic and comedy acts, our two winning performances from Year 4 advanced into the school talent show to compete against winners from across the school. We were honoured to meet members of the Royal family and some familiar faced judges as we performed following a rendition of the National Anthem to mark the Queen’s Jubilee. Well done to all participants, you truly were shining stars!

On Tuesday, we had a lovely morning spent writing in our Author Books. We have thoroughly enjoyed delving into the story ‘Where the forest meets the sea’ by the fantastic Jeannie Baker, taking lots of inspiration for our own non-chronological report writing. It is amazing to see how many artist skills were used in our Author Book and how truly fantastic our information booklets look, alongside our rainforest design. 

For our Computing Day this term, we used the brilliant Book Creator App to undertake a series of creative challenges based around the Harry Potter books. After designing our own wizarding front covers for our newly created digital books, we added audio, animation and effects to bring our stories to life. 

A special ‘well done’ as well to our boys’ football team who faced Woodlands this week in their first match. They made us incredibly proud with their positive attitude and teamwork.

Love Reading have issued their Mid-May Newsletter; please see many more top-read recommendations you may wish to explore with your child/ren. Happy reading!

 

Reminders:

-School commences on Monday 6th June.

-Clarinet lessons remain on Mondays after half term.

-PE lessons will continue to take place every Tuesday and Friday after half term. 

Year 4 - Summer 1 - Week 5

Date: 19th May 2022 @ 11:23am

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This week has truly been one to remember!

Taking a look at a range of notice boards on display in churches across our locality, we were able to deduce the way Christians want to live and the community they create. We found that church notice boards commonly tell us that we need to help others and when events take place that support and bring the community together. Year 4 reflected on how they use the notice boards in our school church to find out when services take place and when events are on that they can attend. 

Taking into account all we have learnt this term about non-chronological reports, we began researching information we could use in our own information booklet to prompt the dangers our rainforests face. After choosing a suitable heading, we discuss relevant subheadings we could include to help categorise our facts into their own paragraphs. Year 4 worked hard to even plan pictures they could use to accompany their facts and bing their information booklet to life. We can’t wait to add more factual information next week, following our visit to Chester Zoo.

It was time to tackle time in Maths this week and to help us along the way, we designed our own clock faces with annotations of the key aspects of time we needed to remember. Ater recapping where we can find o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to, we moved onto identify the time to 5 minutes. It was helpful for us to use our school day to understand things that happen in the AM and those that happen in the PM, before writing times using the 24-hour clock. Next week we will look at ordering time and digital clocks.

With our school values of Hope and Nurture in Mind, we created posters in Geography to encourage others to act now and help save our rainforests. We used our black thinking hats to recall facts about the rainforest and the dangers they face. In Science, we made our own water cycle diagrams using sandwich bags and labelled them with white board pens. It was fascinating to see how the water we placed at the bottom of the bag evaporated when placed in front of the sunlight. 

What a fantastic surprise we had in Music, as we were given the opportunity to have a Music lesson with the brilliant Mr Fogg. By creating rhythms, we ordered a variety of drinks from McDonalds, based on the different beats we made on the drums. 

It is no surprise that the highlight of our week was our trip to Chester Zoo. What a fantastic day out we had full of laughter, animal spotting and of course fun! After exploring the Zoo grounds and taking time to discover our favourite animals, we focused our attention on the rainforest, clearly built to house a variety of plants and  animals inside the zoo. We thought about the equipment needed for such an adventure before exploring why the rainforest is so important to both people and wildlife. 

At Chester Zoo, we also discussed the classification of animals in the rainforest, their adaptations, life cycles and food chains. Of course it’s not all good news, so we also discovered the threats to the rainforest and how actions such as recycling and buying sustainable products can help save this wonderful and important habitat!

Please see the book recommendations provided this month from the charity 'Read for Good'. There is a book for all ages from 3-11 to perhaps inspire the next book purchase or local library loan.
Happy reading!
 
I hope our trip to Chester Zoo forms the start of a lovely weekend for you all, Year 4. See you Monday!

 

Reminders:

-RSE lessons will be taking place in class next week.

-Following half term, pupils return back to school on Monday 6th June.

Year 4 - Summer 1 - Week 4

Date: 11th May 2022 @ 11:02pm

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Lots of highlights and achievements in Year 4 this week. 

After recognising the five colours commonly seen in our local churches, we explored what the different colours stand for. We found many connections in our own lives to the five colours, particularly red, which in the church is used to symbolise sacrifice. Lots of our minds drifted towards the colour red representing the Poppy Appeal…. Whilst others of course couldn’t think of anything other than LFC. 

We can all confidently say we have thoroughly displayed our Collective Worship value of perseverance this week, as we have kept trying even when the going got tough. As we continue to work hard to practise our times tables in preparation for our Multiplication Check, Year 4 are full of self-belief and have a Growth Mindset in order to keep on going and give it their all. Taking time to pause and reflect on this value, we reminded ourselves of God's persevering love and how perseverance is a desirable trait to have.

What fun we had practising our times tables using a Kagan learning technique in Maths. By using Quiz, Quiz, Trade, we were able to ask our peers multiplication calculations and trade our playing cards if we correctly answered the question. Using a bar model, we calculated the change that would be given if an item was paid for using a £10, £20 or £50 note. We used our black thinking hats to recall our number bond facts to help us find the difference. Next week, we begin learning about time and recognising the time on both an analogue and digital clock.

We didn’t stop smiling throughout our Gymnastics lesson, as we carried out a range of partner balance. We worked hard to use our core and upper body strength, to keep our partner in the air. There were certainly lots of aching bodies the following day! In Geography, we compared the modern society we live in to the way of life of tribes who call the rainforest their home. In Science, we helped Willy Wonka to fill his river full of liquid chocolate. Using our investigation skills, we had to explore different ways we could turn chocolate in its solid state, into a liquid. 

In recognition of Mental Health Awareness week, we discussed how when you feel lonely, you might feel sensations in your body. Using chalk and our human outlines, we identified where in the body we feel a sense of loneliness and the things we can do to not feel alone. 

Have a wonderful weekend, Year 4.

Reminders:

-Children should be reading every night at home. Please ensure you comment on your child’s Google Classroom to let us know what book your child is reading and how they are getting on with their reading at home.

-Clarinet lessons every Monday. Clarinets must be brought back to school ready for the lesson.

-Year 4 trip to Chester Zoo on Friday 20th May. 

Year 4 - Summer 1 - Week 3

Date: 5th May 2022 @ 5:25pm

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Yet another fantastic week, here in Year 4! 

Connecting our school value ‘Hope’ and our Collective Worship value ‘Perseverance’, we watched inspirational videos displaying how our sporting heroes never give up, despite many setbacks. This led to a discussion that God can help us when we are feeling like we can’t carry on and by always reminding ourselves of our school values, we can use hope to always try our best.

Using Venn diagrams, we rounded amounts of money to the nearest pound. There was no tricking us that an amount could not belong in the middle circle because every amount either rounded up or down. We then hit the shops, buying items with varying amounts of coins and notes but always ensuring our total amount was reached in the least amount of coins possible. Later in the week, we used our black thinking hats to recall our knowledge of money to help us in finding out how much more money we would need to meet a desired total.

David Attenborough is certainly a treasured idol in our classroom, so we were thrilled to use him as a role model for our writing this week. After watching an episode of his Planet Earth documentary, we then watched a section but this time, with no sound. It was our job to create the narration for the clip to explain just what the hairy pig and tiny shrew were up to. Within our writing, we included factual information, lots of description and kept to the same tense using a third person writing style. 

In Science, we took to the playground to sort images into solids, liquids and gases. One image had us debating…is an ice lolly a solid or a liquid? What do you think? We then investigated the process of changing water from a solid, to a liquid, to a gas. We soon discovered that the process was reversible and learnt new STAR vocabulary - condensation and evaporation. 

Continuing our focus on rainforests, we took to creating a line graph and a bar graph in Geography to show the temperature and rainfall throughout the year. It was a big surprise to us that December was not their coldest month and in fact, the temperature does not really change. 

 

Reminders:

-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.

-PE lessons remain on a Tuesday and Friday each week.

-Clarinets must be in school every Monday for our Music lesson.

 

Year 4 - Summer 1 - Week 2

Date: 26th Apr 2022 @ 11:21am

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The sun has continued to shine and our spirits have been high in Year 4 this week.

After exploring the variety of Churches that can be found around the world, this week, we focused on churches we can find in our local area. After labelling different characteristics of these churches, alongside spotting similarities between them, we set to the task of drawing our own church. Year 4 took particular inspiration from St. Peter’s church and its traditional design. Our designs also incorporated stain glass windows made from a variety of coloured tissue paper and a steeple with a cross placed on top.

In Maths, we took part in a Mathematical investigation to see how many different decimal numbers we could find on a given magic square. After spotting two numbers that could be placed together, we then had to divide the number by 10 in order to form a decimal between 1 and 6. Year 4 also used number cards to create as many different decimals numbers as they could that could fit between two given numbers. It took lots of rearranging of the number cards to find all possibilities, but we were determined to find them all! We also recreated a visit to a toy shop and with our allocated funds, made a shopping list of what we would like to buy. Year 4 were thrilled to also be able to create a wish list of items they couldn’t quite afford yet but informed Miss Mcvey of the required amount they would need to purchase their wish list items. Next week, we will be continuing to make amounts of money and identifying change.

What a week of English lessons we have had! We began by creating a glossary of vocabulary associated with a tropical rainforest, ensuring we used a bold colour to make the word stand out and recorded the key words in alphabetical order. Our focus then turned to recalling when we use an apostrophe in our writing and how we write singular and plural words with a possessive apostrophe. It was a real treat to then watch a clip from Planet Earth, narrated by David Attenborough. We recognised that the transcript of his narration had features of a non-chronological report, which we identified and colour coded.

In recognition of our hard work on World Earth Day, the National Trust Formby presented us with a plaque to honour the incredible mural we created made completely out of recycled materials. Well done, Year 4! You truly showcased our school value of nurture and showed such passion and determination to spread such an important message.

 A huge thank you to Ultimate Kids for a thrilling and incredibly enjoyable activity session. We were so grateful to try a range of different activities, whilst keeping fit and active. We can’t hide our love for sport in Year 4 and it has been a delight to see the children taking so much enjoyment from our Tri-Golf PE lessons this week.

In Art, we turned a monochrome rainforest print into a colourful, bold and vibrant rainforest scene. Through the use of colour, we ensured the parrots jumped off the page and the vegetation disappeared into the background of the picture. We discovered a rainforest is made up of 4 layers in Geography and what the particles look like in different states of matter in Science.

Have a wonderful bank holiday weekend, Year 4.

 

Reminders:

-Children to continue to practise their times tables at home in preparation for the Year 4 Multiplication Check.

-PE lessons take place every Tuesday and Friday.

-Chester Zoo trip payments to be made on School Money.

Year 4 - Summer 1 - Week 1

Date: 21st Apr 2022 @ 8:32pm

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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.

Year 4 - Spring 2 - Week 6

Date: 28th Mar 2022 @ 8:23pm

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Just like that, it is time to wish you all a Happy Easter! It’s hard to believe how quick this term has vanished but they do say time flies when you're having fun.

On Monday, we had a lovely morning spent writing in our Author Books. We have thoroughly enjoyed delving into the story ‘When the Giant Stirred’ by the fantastic Celie Godkin, taking lots of inspiration for our own story writing. It is amazing to see how many artist skills were used in our Author Book and how truly fantastic our stories look, alongside our tropical island designs. 

For our Design and Technology this term, we investigated, designed and created our own mini greenhouses. We began the day by exploring existing greenhouses and investigated their stable structure and features that support plant growth. From this, we discussed suitable materials to create our greenhouses and sketched our own designs, thinking about the features we would need to include. After creating our greenhouses, we planted and watered our own seeds, before evaluating our finished product. Year 4 are keen to keep watering their plants over the Easter break and will use their handy window slits to let the light in.

This week we also completed our Computing Day and what fun we had! We started off Computing Day with a recap of what coding is, what skills we need to code and how we can be creative when animating a variety of images. We then moved onto our Hour of Code activities, designed to broaden our problem-solving skills, logic and creativity. Our favourite activity was most definitely Dance party, as we were able to create dance animations, using code, to our favourite songs. Of course, this was closely followed by our Minecraft activity, using blocks of code to take Steve or Alex on an adventure through this Minecraft world.

With Easter on our minds, it was time to put our detective skills to the test and figure out the locations hidden around our outdoor area, to complete our own special Easter hunt. For successful completion of the hunt, we won a surprise Easter token to exchange for a special Easter treat. We also completed a variety of Easter crafts and connected our learning with our Art topic of patterns, to design our own patterned Easter eggs. What an EGGcellent day we had!

A huge thank you to Year 3, who led such a beautiful Easter Service this week. It truly concluded our term in such a beautiful way and reminded us of the significance of the Easter period.

We wish you all an amazing Easter break and we look forward to seeing your smiles back in class on Tuesday 19th April.

 

Reminders:

-Clarinet continue next term, every Monday.

-PE lessons take place every Tuesday and Friday.

-Year 4’s weekly spellings and Virtual Classroom can be found on Google Classroom.

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