Welcome back to term 5. It’s hard to believe that the children only have two more terms in Year 4! We have had a great week, and the children have returned with fantastic learning attitudes. Here is what we have been up to this week…

Maths

In maths this week we have been learning about position and direction. The children have recapped coordinates and then used this understanding to plot points on a 2D grid the make polygons. A polygon is a 2D shape with at least 3 straight sides. See the example below.

The children then learnt a new skill called translation. This is where a point on a 2D grid is moved by giving a movement instruction e.g. translate the point 4 left and 2 up. The children then write the coordinates of where the point would be after the translation. Once we got the hang of this, the children then learnt how to translate a whole polygon by translating each point at a time. See the example below.

Next week we will be learning about angles; acute, obtuse and right angles.

English

In English this week, we have begun reading our new text called ‘Tales of Wisdom and Wonder’. This is a book of short stories retold by Hugh Lupton. This week we read a story called The Curing Fox; ask your child to tell you the story! We are learning how to write play scripts this week and next week. We have been exploring lots of play scripts to become familiar with what they are like and have enjoyed using them to do some acting in our ‘Reading for Pleasure’ session this week. We have learnt how to use the structure of a play script, including the fact that we do not need inverted commas for speech! We then write The Curing Fox story as a play script and the children learnt how to write the narrator part and how to write stage directions. I think we have a few budding playwrights in Year 4, they have been thoroughly enjoying this week!

Next week, we will be designing stage scenery, doing some more work on narration and stage directions, using the laptops to write a scene (learning how to use bold and italics to enhance our play scripts even more) and finally planning our showpiece.

Thematic

This week we started our new themed unit called ‘Water World’. We began with some geography and a lot of map work. The children located and labelled some main rivers of the UK (Thames, Trent, Mersey, Severn and Tyne) and then labelled some famous rivers of the World on a World map (the Mississippi, Amazon, Nile, Ganges and Yangtze rivers). We also learnt about some of the capital cities of the World focussing on the capital of England, France, Spain, Italy, Ukraine and Germany – test your children to see if they can remember them. Do they know any others?! We located these countries on a map of Europe and precisely labelled where the capital cities were too.

Next week we will be doing some more geography and learning about how rivers can affect the way land is used.

Spellings

Mr Oxley’s group:

tea, sea, meat, beat, dear, team, leap, leaf, fast, last, past

Challenge words: easy, please, beaver

Mrs Cousin’s and Miss Stephens’ groups:

irregular, irrelevant, irresponsible, irrational, irresistible, irreversible, irreplaceable, irritation, pressure, probably, promise

Love to Learn

This week’s home learning task is maths. In week 3 of this term, we will be learning about Roman Numerals. Find out what symbol the Romans used for these numbers and present it on a poster in your books: 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000. You can decorate your poster and make it look ‘Roman’ if you’d like to. If you would like more of a challenge, you can write more numbers as Roman Numerals e.g. 4,6, 9, 11, 52, 110 etc.

Please could this challenge be handed in by Wednesday 30^th April.

Messages

• Year 4 now have PE on a Thursday. 

Dates to remember

Term 5 Dates for your Diary

30th April – Year 4 Come dine with me picnic at 12.10pm

5th May – Bank Holiday

6th May – Thrive Coffee Afternoon at 3.30pm

21st May – Year 4 class assembly 2.50-3.05

23rd May – Be here, Be you, Belong celebration. Children can come to school wearing anything they feel represents them as part of our ‘Dress to Express’ day. We will have a parade at 2pm on the field to celebrate this, to which our families are all invited.

 

Many thanks

We hope you have a lovely weekend

Mrs Cousins and Mr Oxley