Welcome to Year 4’s Spring 2 Blog!
“The beautiful thing about learning, is that nobody can take it away from you”
B.B. King
Welcome to year 4’s blog for Spring 2. We are excited to share with you all of the fantastic work we have produced. We’ve been super busy exploring our Amazon Rainforest topic, writing a variety of genres and practising our times tables a lot! Read on to hear more about our learning this half term…
Writing:
In our writing lessons we have linked this learning to our topic of ‘The Amazon’ We have been thinking about reasons for and against cutting down trees in the rainforest and the children have come up with some fantastic reasons. The final pieces of these discussion texts were fantastic – some classes are still busy producing some paintings to present them! Some classes have been handing out pen licenses for superb handwriting which is fantastic. Let’s see if we can get any more handed out in the summer term!
Maths:
Fractions key vocabulary:
Perhaps you could ask your child what these key terms are…
- Numerator
- Denominator
- Equivalent
- Mixed number
- Improper fraction
In our maths lessons we started by exploring fractions. We learnt about mixed numbers, improper fractions and how to convert one to the other. We looked at fractions on a number line and briefly explored equivalent fractions. Key vocabulary is a big focus, especially in our maths lessons, and we have been exploring the key terms in each lesson, making sure they understand words such as ‘equivalent’, ‘numerator’, ‘denominator’ and ‘improper’. Finally, we learnt how to add and subtract fractions, including mixed numbers. The children tried really hard with this and produced some beautiful work in their books to demonstrate their understanding.
Fractions key vocabulary:
Perhaps you could ask your child what these key terms are…
- Decimal point
- Tenth
- Hundredth
We then moved onto learning about decimals. We explored the link between fractions and decimals and used lots of visual representations to show which fractions and decimals are equivalent. At the beginning of this topic we explored tenths and how we can represent a tenth on a place value chart. We then moved on to dividing 1 and 2-digit numbers by 10, ending up with a decimal answer. The children have been exposed to new vocabulary and concepts, such as ‘decimal point’ and understanding how we represent decimals on a place value chart. The children have done a fantastic job so far, and we can really see the learning through the answers they have given, with sentence stems to support them.
Reading:
In our reading lessons we have been reading the fiction book ‘The Wild Robot’. The children have really enjoyed reading this book, and some have even seen the most recent film, which has aided their understanding. A variety of reading skills have been explored including summarising, predicting, comprehension, inference, retrieval and authorial intent. We have taken part in role play, thought about the similarities and differences between characters and how character’s emotions change over the course of a story. We have performed choral and echo reading sessions which have allowed us to hear the children reading with the correct tone, expression and intonation. This ensures that children understand the way in which texts have been written and how punctuation and structure have an influence on the way we read as a reader. There have been lots of opportunities for new vocabulary to be shared, and the children have been very curious to know what some of the words in the text mean when they are unsure. Recently, the children explored setting descriptions and predicted what they thought settings looked like, based on the words and phrases used in the text. As our year group are very artistic, this was an activity they really enjoyed.
We have just moved on to poetry, where we will be looking at a range of poem from a collection called ‘Being Me: Doing Nothing’ by Liz Brownlee. This two-week unit will focus on the features of poetry, the effect that different poetic devices has on the reader and eventually having a go at writing our own short poem. We are looking forward to seeing what the children produce in the last week of the spring term.
Geography:
We have had a fantastic time continuing with our Amazon Rainforest topic. We were lucky enough to visit Whipsnade Zoo and take part in an educational talk as part of our learning, which also linked in with our science topic of ‘living things and their environments’. We are actually really sad to be coming to the end of the unit as we have really enjoyed it – and what fantastic pieces of work have been produced! Year 4 teachers were blown away by the effort that lots of children made in creating their own Amazon Rainforest. We received work made out of shoe boxes, paintings, posters, interactive books, powerpoint presentations and pop up books. The time and effort the children spent in creating these is credible and a big thank you to parents for assisting with this and supporting the children.
We have continued to learn about the inside of the Amazon rainforest, Amazonian tribes, Amazonian animals before moving onto rivers and how they are used. Did you know that the Amazon River is the largest river in terms of volume? Ask your child if they know the largest river in the world by length! We have learnt about the features of a river, where rivers start and how they play a very important part of the water cycle. Have a look below at some of the fantastic rainforests and some of the insides of the children’s books!
School Value – Curiosity:
To support the children in understanding how we can show our school values, in particular curiosity for this half term, we have explored lots of ‘Amazing People’ and what they have done which encompasses our current half term value. We’ve learnt about Alan Turing, Howard Florey, Isaac Newton, Percy Julian and Beulah Henry. We watched clips and listened to their story to find out what they did that changed the world and how curiosity was shown. At the end of the half term, we will be reflecting on these people and thinking about ways that we can show curiosity in the future.
Outdoor learning:
As we are coming into the warmer months, we are going to be doing some gardening. We have a variety of seeds that we will be planting in the allotments area of the school and taking on jobs in classes to maintain the garden area and ensure that we allow the correct conditions for the seeds to grow. We will then group the children to be put in charge of watering, de weeding, tidying, clearing rubbish or litter that has entered the area and preparing soil using our gardening equipment. We look forward to this and will share the updates in our next blog!
Science:
Our science topic this half term has continued with ‘living things and their environments’. Just before the half term we had our fantastic Whipsnade Zoo trip. The children really enjoyed themselves and engaged in a very interesting educational talk, where they got to look at different animals’ skeleton and work out, from their features, what type of animal they were. We were quite surprised by some of them, but we all managed to identify the hippo! In class, we have been learning about food chains and webs and how some animals share the same characteristics, but each one can be classified differently. We even had a go at classifying living things and coming up with our own questions. At the very end of the topic, we are going to be doing a piece of cross curricular writing. This involves the children choosing from 1 of 5 different topics, and using their knowledge of writing a discussion text from English, to explain reasons for and against either:
- Should we save water?
- Should we use less energy for lighting at school?
- Should we have more bins on the playground?
- Should we put up bird boxes on the school grounds?
- Should we be able to play in the nature reserve
We are confident the children will produce some excellent pieces of work and we can’t wait hear what they choose to write about!
Thank you for taking the time to read what the children have been up to. We hope you all have a restful break when it arrives, and we look forward to welcoming the children back after the holidays! Can you believe we are going to be going into the summer term!?
