As we finish our first half term together, the year 4 team would like to thank all parents and carers for their support and community spirit over the past few weeks. We feel that the children have settled back well and the learning has been productive and well-progressed over this time.
We finished off our topic with a range of activities in each lesson this week. In English, we created a collage of our invented Ancient Greek God or Goddess and developed a profile for them in our English books. In these profiles, we looked at the light and dark sides of our characters and the symbolism with which they are viewed, for example a certain animal or object that they are associated with.
In science, our final Greek philosopher and scientist was Anaxagoras. We investigated his theories about the sun being a “red-hot mass” and the moon being solid by making our own globes and using torches (representing the sun) and mirrors (representing the moon) to see how light from the sun is reflected from the moon onto the Earth. Key learning from this lesson was:
- Light travels in straight lines
- The Earth orbits the sun
- The moon orbits the Earth
- Light is reflected off of all objects, which is how we see them
We finished with the story of Athena and the Olive tree in Guided Reading, learning new words such as “clad”, “crown”, “crest”, “chute” and “stock-still” and used our prediction skills to decide which God/Goddess the temple in King Cecrops new city would be dedicated to.
In maths, we revised subtraction – this time with four-digit numbers – and used place value grids and column subtraction to do this. Please find below our worksheets from this week, which include a range of problem-solving activities that involve subtraction:
We also had a whole school focus on healthy living this week. As well as partaking in yoga, mindfulness and exploring how to support our mental wellbeing alongside our physical wellbeing, we looked more in depth at the benefits of the Daily Mile and had a go at running a mile (9 laps of the arena) in our best time – around 6-10 minutes across the classes!
Next half term:
- Term starts Monday 2nd November 2020.
- All children must wear a coat to school.
- All children must bring their PE kits back on the first day.
- We will be starting Art and Forest School next term. We will share with you the forest school booklet where you can find all the information about the sessions. The children will be learning to use loppers. Here is a description. It would be great if the children could familiarise themselves with this but we will going through it in detail in the sessions.
Here is a 
Next term our topic is ‘Power and Invasion’ and we will be looking especially at the roots of racism and how we can combat it. Some particularly good texts you may wish to explore are below.
Our Guided Reading text for the week after half term is the Ramayana – an ancient Sanskrit epic poem detailing the story of Rama and Sita.
HAVE A LOVELY HALF TERM!