We have been really pleased to see how well the children settled into Year 4 after such an eventful summer term! They have demonstrated a fabulous attitude to learning and we have been really proud of them.
This half term we started our Whole class Reading with Romans on the Rampage by Jeremy Strong. The children have loved getting to grips with the machinations of the Raven and the Latin words! They have been inspired to create their own inventions like the inventor: Maddasbananus and have really started to use the VIPERS (Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Summarise) skills when answering questions.
With our Writing sessions, we have focussed on Fantasy stories and then Newspaper Reports. The children demonstrated their understanding of fronted adverbials, expanded noun phrases, paragraphs and inverted commas. The children have created some marvellous newspaper articles about a Roman Gladiator fight using these techniques.
In our Maths lessons, we have recapped on Place Value from Year 3 and then continued to learn Year 4 Place Value using place value charts, counters and Base Ten to aid their understanding. They have enjoyed the journey from Year 3 to Year 4 work and have shown a determination in their learning. This gave them a solid base when starting our next mathematical unit: Addition and Subtraction.
Our Year 4 Science topic was States of Matter and the children were very enthusiastic over the experiments and writing their predictions and the results! They particularly enjoyed trying to decide what state (gas, liquid or solid) the ice cube would be in when placed in a clay pot with damp sand.
We were impressed with the variety of ways the children chose to demonstrate the Water Cycle too!
For R.E., we have been concentrating on answering our big question: “What difference does being a Muslim make to daily life?” First, we discussed our prior knowledge from Year 3 and then we continued to learn about Islam using this knowledge to help us answer our question.
In History, we have focussed on the Roman Empire, how and why the Romans invaded Britain, what they did for Britain, why they left and Boudicca’s revolt. The children found this fascinating and were excited to discover the Romans had ‘fast food’ stalls and a dish very similar to a burger!