What a fantastic final week Year 4 have had, we cannot believe that our first term is already finished. We have all had a brilliant term learning about many things from Ancient Egyptians to refugees. Highlights have been; making string telephones, starting TastED sessions, forest school, our Egyptian museums and writing speeches.
This week in English we continued our work on direct speech; writing a narrative that contains direct speech and ensuring it was punctuated correctly. We based this piece on Kensuke’s Kingdom, imagining how Michael and Kensuke’s first meeting would have differed if Kensuke was able to speak English. We will continue to practice our direct speech at the beginning of next term.
For maths this week we continued to look at decimals; focusing on rounding to the nearest whole and tenth. We continued to use the rounding rules (1,2,3,4 round down, 5,6,7,8,9 – round up) and played the rounding game as a fun way to practice our skills. On Wednesday we had a Maths carousel where children were able to consolidate various aspects of their Maths learning from across the term and take on a challenge or two. The Maths sheets for this week are here: Maths sheets W7 Remote learning carousel
During our STEM morning of the term we explored muffling sound and considered which materials best stop sound from spreading. We read ‘Peace at Last’ and then the children worked in triads to test different materials and create the ultimate earmuffs for father bear to get a good nights sleep.
We had an extra special, final forest school session this week featuring the campfire! The children helped set up the fire, made damper bread and washed it all down with a nice cup of hot chocolate. Forest school has been a highlight of everyone’s week this half-term and all of us (including the adults) have learnt lots of new outdoor skills. A big thank you goes to Mrs Khan for planning such a wonderful term of activities.
We also had the bonus of a topic-based TastEd session this week, linked to our work on refugees. We considered how we each have specific food-related memories and how this may change dependent on our culture and background. To test this everyone smelt some spices and talked about the dishes and memories we associated these with. We then made a chickpea salad with tomato, garlics and herbs.
Over the past two weeks each class has had the opportunity to make a Christmas decoration in the art room. Amazon class created snowy canvas paintings, Nile made clay polar bears and Thames made animal fridge magnets, all of which looked amazing.
Extra information:
School returns on the 5th January 2022. The 4th January is an INSET day.
Next term in guided reading, we will be reading ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Bad Beginning’.
Some children would like to finish Kensuke’s Kingdom over the Christmas break. If you do not have the book your children can listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8A2PF_nXok&list=PLSSt7BGE5I0iB3YnKYZK4ibusnaeWsb4u&index=9
All classes will have PE in the first week back. Please ensure your child brings their PE kit back with them. If you would like some PE activities for your child to do across the holidays the attached links are a great way for them to get in some exercise. https://www.nhs.uk/healthier-families/activities/
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Thank you for all of your support this term and we hope you have a great Christmas holidays and a wonderful New Year. See you in 2022!