Year 4 Blog Friday 15th September 2023

Date: 15th Sep 2023 @ 11:17am

Welcome to your Friday blog. We’ve had a great week in Year 4.  We’ve been settling in to our new routines and been working extremely hard.

In English, we listed ideas for and against Michael and his family sailing around the world. We then wrote a balanced argument explaining in more detail arguments for and against the sailing adventure. We tried our best to give detail and use paragraphs.  

In Maths, we learnt more about place value to 10 000 using part whole diagrams, and partitioning and recombing numbers.  In addition, we built on our learning of decimal tenths and used place value counters to help with our understanding. We also compared whole and decimal numbers using the greater than and less than symbols.   

In RE, we learnt about Jesus’ human family and discussed the names we recognised from the Bible. In addition, we read the story of Abraham, the father of a great nation, who trusted God and discussed the reasons for his actions.

In History, we started our Romans topic.  We learnt where the Roman Empire started and when. 

In Computing, we explored Publisher. We used different shapes to try and make a symmetrical pattern, including rotating, resizing and adding colour to the shapes.

In PSHE, we discussed what makes a person happy. We shared our ideas and then wrote words and illustrated our thoughts in our books. We came up with some lovely ideas including family, friends, compliments, smiles, sports and hobbies. We also discussed as a class what our ground rules should be during the PSHE lessons. 

In Science, we started the topic Living Things and their Habitats. The first lesson was learning about the 7 Life Processes: Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion and Nutrition. We used the acronym MRS GREN to help us remember what these were and explain what each one means.

Home Practice

Reading

Please read for 20 minutes each evening to an adult at home.  Make sure you discuss the story and the characters.  Find the meaning of any new words too.  Reading every night will help you read more fluently and with understanding. 

Counting

This week, please practise counting in 10’s – draw a line and some marks on it like I do in class. You could write the numbers down as you count up.  When you count down, cover the numbers up, say the number, then reveal what you have got written down to check you’ve said the correct number.

Count in 10’s

For example, start at 0 and count up to 120 and back again 

0   10  20   etc                      120   110   100   etc

For example, start at 157 and count up to 207 and back again

157   167   177        etc              207   197   187   etc

Times tables

You should have been given your times table target this week. Please therefore practise this times table in preparation for your test next week, on Wednesday (20^th September 2023).  Ask someone at home to test you on your tables – can you recall them quickly and accurately?

Remember you can also practise your tables playing Hit the Button and timestables.co.uk

Another app for practising tables and number facts is One Minute Maths from White Rose.  It is free to download from the AppStore and PlayStore. There are lots of excellent games you can play which will help you brush up your mental maths skills.  Please do your best to access this fabulous free resource!  Knowing your tables and number facts off by heart is crucial and will help you in many different areas of maths.

Spellings

Here are this week’s spellings. You will be tested on these words next Wednesday.

treasure      measure       pleasure       enclosure    closure

displeasure  composure    leisure         exposure      disclosure

address       appear         breadth       answer         accidentally 

Sumdog challenges

You have been set 3 challenges on Sumdog:

• A maths challenge to recognise the place value of each digit in a 4 digit number
• A times tables challenge based on the 2 and 10 times tables
• A spelling challenge based on the spellings above

Please make sure you log on and have a go!  Little and often is the key to success!

Thank you for attending our Meet the Teacher meeting on Thursday evening.  We have attached the PowerPoint below.

Have a lovely weekend

The Year 4 Team

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