We have had an amazing week in year 4. From performing our harvest festival assembly to our visiting grown-ups to making ear defenders in science, we have had a lot of fun and shown a lot of courage!

 

Maths

In maths this week we have been learning formal written methods for addition. The children have been practising using the column method to add numbers up to 4 digits. They have learnt how to regroup if one of the columns totals more than 9, and then remembering to add this regrouped number on to the next column. We also looked at missing numbers in the column method and worked backwards to find out what the numbers were.

Next week, we will be learning formal written methods for subtraction using the column method.

English

In English this week we finished our writing unit about character descriptions. The final skill the children learnt was to use fronted adverbials to start their sentences in a character description instead of starting sentences in boring ways such as The… The… or He… He….. They wrote some fantastic descriptions of the robot WALL-E to practice using these sentence openers. They then planned and wrote their showpiece, where they tried to use all the skills learnt to describe Maui from Moana; they did brilliantly!

Next week, we will continue to read The Iron Man, and we will be learning how to write an information text, our first non-fiction writing of Year 4.

Thematic

In Thematic this week, we continued our themed learning unit ‘Make some noise!’ We found out that sounds can travel through different media, not just air. The children thoroughly enjoyed using a tuning fork, hitting it and placing it in water to see the vibrations of the sound in the water. We also used a string telephone and found out that sounds can travel through the string. We concluded that sounds can travel through solids, liquids and gases. We also found out that sounds travel the fastest through solids because the particles in a solid are packed closely together and so can pass the sound on more quickly than in liquids and gases where the particles are further apart. The children also learnt that sound cannot travel through a vacuum because there are no particles in a vacuum.

In our second science lesson of the week, we learnt why people may need to protect their ears, and how they can protect them. We made our own ear defenders from card, paper towels and tissue. The children loved doing this and did extremely well, ending up with some brilliant ear defenders! Here we are making and wearing them…

In our last lesson of the week, the children posed their own scientific questions about sound and used the internet to find the answers. They came up with some very interesting questions and did very well finding the answers!

Next week we will be learning about pitch.

Spellings

Spellings to practice this week for a test on Thursday are:

crazily, angrily, easily, hungrily, clumsily, cheekily, merrily, accidentally, actually, believe 

Challenge word (optional to learn): temporarily

Love to Learn

This week’s Love to Learn task is an English one. We would like you to pick 6 of the fronted adverbials below and write a sentence starting with each one. You could choose a theme, for example, your sentences could be all about animals or Minecraft. For more of a challenge, the children can try to write sentences for all the fronted adverbials below. DON’T FORGET THE COMMA AFTER THE FRONTED ADVERBIAL 😊

Angrily,

All of a sudden,

Just then,

Gracefully,

Jumping excitedly,

Totally exhausted,

In the blink of an eye,

Silently,

Nervously,

After a while,

The next day,

Cautiously,  

Dates for the diary

23rd October – Halloween Disco – All children come to school in fancy dress. Year 1, 2 and 3 Disco from 2pm-3pm and year 4, 5 and 6 disco from 3.15-4.15

23rd October – Final day of term

 

We hope you have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Cousins, Mr Cook and Miss Davey