Spring 1 Week 1 Year 4

Date: 10th Jan 2025 @ 8:30am

Year 4 blog – week 1 – Spring 1

It has just been wonderful to welcome the children back into school this week, and although the snow has presented its challenges, it has also reminded us just how beautiful nature can be.

In our Ready, Steady Spell lessons we have been looking at words with the ‘s’ sound spelt as ‘sc’ such as scenery, the ‘sh’ sound spelt as ‘ch’ such as parachute, and the ‘k’ sound spelt as ‘ch’ such as in mechanic. Today, the children have gone home with their spellings and will be tested on them next Friday.

Guided reading started with us being introduced to Beowulf by Michael Morpurgo.  It is a fictional prince of the Geats of southern Sweden who comes to Denmark to help King Hrothgar rid his fabulous hall, Heorot, of a terrible monster known as Grendel. The hero mortally wounds the creature, who flees the hall to die in its lair. The next night, Grendel's mother comes to Heorot to avenge her offspring and kills one of Hrothgar's men. Beowulf tracks her down and kills her, then returns to Heorot, where he receives great gifts before returning home. We have been looking at the text closely to make inferences and justify these with evidence from the text, thinking about characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motives.

We had a special delivery in English from Mrs Sant, who explained that someone wearing a red hat had dropped off some gold envelopes and then quickly vanished. We opened these up to find the endings of fairy tales cut up inside. This started off our English, and we have been introduced to the story: The Lost Happy Endings. We now realised that the witch has stolen all the happy endings from the children’s story books and it's going to be up to us to get them back! This week we have been looking closely at expanding noun phrases through the use of adjectives and prepositions in order to extend our sentences. Prepositions give position in time or space. ‘The veiny, decrepit witch looked out of the shattered mirror beneath the sink.’ (space) ‘The witch stuffed Hansel in a cage just after sunrise.’ (time). We used dictionaries to explore the meanings of new vocabulary and phrases, and the children also had a go at writing a poem all about one of the characters from the story. Next week we will continue to immerse ourselves in this text and hopefully find a way to get all the happy endings back to the storybooks to save bedtime for all the children.

In math, we have been introduced to factors for the first time. When they multiply two whole numbers together to give a product, both the numbers that they multiplied together are factors of the product.  6x4=24, so 6 and 4 are factors of 24.  6 and 4 are also referred to as a factor pair.  Next, we used this knowledge to write equivalent calculations.  3 and 4 are a factor pair of 12, this means that 5x12 is equivalent to 5x3x4 or 5x4x3.    Following on from this we multiplied one- and two-digit numbers by ten and one hundred.  1 ten is 10 times the size of 1 and 1 hundred is 10 times the size of one ten.  The children used place value mats to move the digits one or two places to the left depending on whether they were multiplying by 10 or 100.

Our RE day, which was timetabled for Friday will move to Monday where the children will tackle the question of how Jesus’ actions showed He was the son of God. They will discuss His miracles, how this showed His divinity and the effect on the people who witnessed them.

Every Monday I will teach the children a Makaton sign, and this week it was ‘Happy New Year.’

We have revised the times tables that the children were taught in Year 3: 3’s, 4’s and 8’s.  The children should be able to recall multiplication and division facts for these times tables.

I’m going to try and visit Mr Spillsbury next week (we will make a card in school from the children), but if you have any messages that you would like me to pass on to him, please send me a dojo, and I will make sure he gets them. The children and staff are really missing him.

Maths homework pages – pg 44-47

Spellings (ready for a spelling test next Friday) –

ascend

muscle

scent

chef

charade

chemist

character

stomach

calendar

circle

Kind regards

Year 4 Team (Miss Moran, Mrs Marshfield, Miss Gadsby, Miss Porteous and Mrs McAree)