“In the summertime, when the weather is high
You can stretch right up and touch the sky”

The summer term is upon us and we can hardly believe there is only one more half term left! The children have had a busy start to their final term in year 4, covering lots of interesting topics including the Amazon River and rainforest as well as ‘living things are their environments’. During this half term we have had a healthy food road show where children enjoyed interacting and watching a cooking demonstration and a visit from the author Vashti Hardy. We hope you enjoy reading about some of our learning from this half term. Watch out for our next blog, it will be the final one of the year!

From the Year 4 team: Mrs Clarke, Miss Connolly and Miss Shah. 

Maths

This half term we have been exploring decimals and money. During our decimals unit, children learnt how to partition decimals, compare and order them and understood how to make a whole with tenths and hundredths. Throughout all of our maths lessons, we encourage the use of concrete resources to support the children, which are always readily available on their tables. For this unit, children were using place value charts and place value counters.  We then moved onto money. The children particularly enjoyed this topic and were eager to put their learning into day-to-day practise. We explored converting pounds into pennies, comparing amounts of money and working out worded money problems.

Reading

We started off our reading unit with a book called ‘Belonging’ This was slightly different to our usual books as it was a picture book. The book was about a little girl who was looking out of a window. With each picture, the environment outside her home was changing. The children really enjoyed seeing the changes that were happening and started to think about the changes that happen outside their own windows. It explored popular environmental issues we currently face and it got the children thinking about what we can do to help our environment and make it a greener space. It was really interesting how observant the children were with the pictures, and were spotting things even the teachers hadn’t seen! We then moved onto the novel ‘Varjak Paw’. Throughout this book, the children were given the opportunity to practise their retrieval skills as well as inferencing. We will be continuing this book into the first half of summer 2.

Writing

We covered two topics during this half term. An informative piece of writing and a narrative. Our informative piece of writing was related to our Geography topic – The Amazon rainforest. Children really enjoyed this unit as they were able to pull knowledge they had learnt from previous lessons and included this in their final piece of writing. Lots of their writing involved them discussing deforestation – something we have been learning a lot about this half term. See below for some excellent pieces of work and the beautiful handwriting that some of our children are producing. Our narrative was based on a short clip called ‘The night fairy’. During this unit children explored the use of fronted adverbials, noun phrases and propositional phrases. We covered more grammatical features and revised others that we have covered before.

School Food Showdown!

In the final week of the half term, we were lucky enough to have a visit from a company called ‘School Food Showdown’. This is a roadshow designed to inform children about health eating and living. We got to be involved with and watch a ‘cook off’ between the teachers and children, and then some of us got to do the tasting to see which team were the winners! It was a fantastic afternoon and lots of fun was had by everyone. What a great way to finish the half term!