It has been a short but jam-packed week in Year 4!
It was anti-bullying week this week and in our classes, we discussed what bullying is and how we can spread kindness through small acts and words. We talked about how acts of kindness make us feel and will display these words as a reminder to show kindness to one another. If you want to explore this further you could join Kids’ Kindness Club. This is a free resource where members receive email newsletter, which include kindness challenges, kind stories, quizzes, competitions. www.kidskindnessclub.org
In Topic this week, we have continued our learning about refugees. The children learnt more about: who refugees are; how they have to leave their homes very quickly; and the difficult decisions they have to make about what to take with them.
Inspired by our learning about refugees, we have started to write speeches in English about what we can do to support them. We began our week by watching some different speeches and identified the persuasive and emotive features within them. To build our confidence in speaking in front of others, we have been playing persuasion games in pairs and with the whole class. We have learnt about different techniques that people use in their speeches to make them more persuasive such as rhetorical questions, the power of three and repetition. The children have really shown courage in speaking in front of others, on the spot, about different topics. Next week, we will continue to write our speeches with persuasive and emotional language and with a focus on structuring paragraphs. Once the children’s speeches are written, they will take them home to practice and in the spring term there will be a class and community event where they will share them. Watch this space for more information!
In Maths, we have been learning about tenths. To help us understand tenths, we used this sentence:
The whole is divided into 10 equal parts. Each equal part is a tenth.
The children explored what a tenth is and showed this in different ways. They then identified how tenths can be represented in pictures and numbers. We finished the week by using different resources to count in tenths. You can find the sheets we used here: Maths Worksheets W3 PDF
The children have enjoyed another computing session this week and are becoming more confident in writing and debugging their code. They are working very well collaboratively and show resilience when they have problems and when things do not go to plan.
On Friday we joined the whole school in turning the computers and lights off and did our best to work without electricity. We did this to find out how much we spend on electricity in a day and to see if we can reduce our electricity usage to help the planet and ourselves. We did Science without electricity and investigated how sounds are made. We used tuning forks to help us understand that sounds are made when objects vibrate and we learnt that sound travels better in solids because the particles are closer together. Based on this, we investigated the question: Which solid does sound travel best through?
The children have enjoyed another great Forest School session this week where they used saws and created variety of forest art. As the weather gets colder it is important each child has appropriate clothing for their forest school sessions; these need to be brought in on the following days:
Monday – Nile
Tuesday – Thames
Friday – Amazon
Please make sure your children now have their PE kit in school.
In guided reading next week, we will be reading Chapter 5 of Race to the Frozen North.
We look forward to speaking to you all next week during our learning conversations.