Year 4 – Spring Term

English

This half term, we will continue to read a wide range of genres within reading concentrating particularly on vocabulary, retrieval of information and making inferences in the texts we read. We will be reading the book Christophe, which is about a young Rwandan refugee now living in the UK who is struggling to adjust to his new school, a new language, and new life. This will lead to writing our own stories. Linking our writing to geography, we will also write a report about natural disasters.

Maths

We will continue to practice our times tables which will prepare us for the online times table test in June. This will continue to be a focus for homework because the more children practice then the easier it will be to rapidly recall them. Our focus will be fractions and decimals (where times tables are extremely important) as well as finding the area of more complex shapes.

Computing

Children will have the opportunity to become budding film animators using the program Lego Animation. They will explore what animation is and create their own using props and characters.

Science

In our topic animals including humans, we will explore the digestive system including learning the parts as well as its function. We will also investigate the function of our teeth and the cause of tooth decay. Food chains will be investigated where we will construct and interpret a variety of food chains, identifying producers, predators, and prey.

Humanities

We will be exploring natural disasters such as volcanos and tsunamis, the impact it has on a location and the people who live in these areas. They will be given the opportunity to discover why this natural phenomenon occurs and how communities deal with the disaster and the aftermath.

Art

Children will be given the opportunity to explore the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh. We will explore the artist himself and understand the importance of why his work is still popular. Children will be inspired to produce their own landscape portraits in the style of Van Gogh.

PE

Year 4 will continue to have PE on a Thursday and Friday so PE kit should be in school on these days. Our focus this half term will be dynamic dance where children get to explore the line dancing style and apply this to create their own dances. Children will have lots of fun working as a team to devise their dances.

RE

Our focus will be learning about the Easter story and the importance this event is to Christians. We will explore the resurrection and the events leading up to this.

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Year 4P – What we did in Autumn 1

During the first half term, we learnt a lot of new things.

Maths

In Maths we learnt about place value and how to do the following:

• Round numbers to nearest 10 and 100
• Number lines to 10,000
• Roman numerals to 100
• Finding 1000 more or less
• Comparing 4-digit numbers
• Ordering numbers to 10,000
• Solving problems using rounding
• Negative numbers

Literacy

In literacy, we started a new book called ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles.’ It was about a family moving to a new house that belonged to their crazy aunt. Whilst staying at the house they find a hidden room and upset a small creature called a Bogart. This is the first book out of five that we may read over the year.

History

During this topic, we learnt all about ‘The War of the Roses.’ It was really fascinating to find that the house of Tudor began because of the war of the Roses and the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Science

In our science topic, we learnt all about electricity and how to wire a circuit in series and parallel. We also learnt all about conductors and insulators of electricity.

Computing

Computing has been really exciting; we used a software package called ‘Sketchbook.’ In this software we used layers whilst drawing, this enabled us to draw on different layers so that the original stayed the same.

Art

During this subject, we learned all about how to join materials using different types of stitching. During the term we made a purse/wallet that could be used.