Year 4 2024 - 2025
Mrs Keating
Welcome to the Summer term!
I hope you have all had a restful Easter break and enjoyed spending a little more time with family and friends. I can’t quite believe we’re in the final term already! As we venture into a hopefully warm and sunny term ahead, we are looking forwards to lots of exciting learning opportunities, including swimming, Savio House and our new history and geography topics: ‘Anglo-Saxons, Picts and Scots’ and ‘Settlements/Earning a living’. We will also be working towards our class assembly, which is set to go ahead at 9.15am on Wednesday 21st May.
Religion
Following our reflection upon the events of Holy Week before Easter, we now continue our learning within our new unit ‘To the ends of the Earth.’ Within this unit, we will look at Peter and his role within the church, God’s work through the apostles, the church in the world and the Communion of Saints. Children will reflect on their own faith in God and discuss how they can grow and deepen their own understanding of the church.
History and Geography
During the first half term, in History, children will learn all about the people who lived in and migrated to Britain after the Romans left and explore the different tribes, cultures and religions found there. The topic is called ‘Anglo-Saxons, Picts and Scots.’ We will also extend their historical vocabulary and deepen their chronological understanding of British history.
In our Geography lessons, children will travel back to the time of the early village settlers as they discover how towns and villages got their names and why certain areas were chosen as settlements. They will then return to the present day and look at settlements and explore maps of surrounding areas. Children will also get the opportunity to take on the role of town planner as they design their own settlement.
English
This term, we will continue writing and developing our exciting conflict-resolution story, write chocolate-themed poetry (yum!) using Michael Rosen’s narrative poetry as stimulus, and we will also be continuing our focus on the VIPERS areas of comprehension, developing vocabulary, inference, prediction, explaining, retrieval and summarising skills. We will delve into the book ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ by Ted Hughes, which I’m certain will be a hit!
Maths
In maths, we will be improving our knowledge and skills across a range of areas including decimals, money, time and geometry. Following the Power Maths scheme, problem-solving and reasoning skills also underpin each unit. In June, children in Year 4 will be completing a mandatory times tables test. The expectation is for them to know all the times tables facts up to their 12x tables and to answer each question within a 6 second window. There will be 25 questions altogether and the test will be completed on a computer. TTRockstars is an excellent practise for this test as it gets children used to the format of questioning. If you would like any ideas for resources that provide extra times tables practise at home, please get in touch.
Science
In science, we will be beginning a new unit on Animals including humans where the children will be learning all about teeth, the digestive system (including a fun experiment involving a pair of tights!) and food chains. Our final science unit this year will be living things and habitats. Within this unit, we will be enjoying lots of time outside exploring our local habitats and the living things that can be found there.
Music
In music, we will spend the first half term working towards creating advertising jingles using the interrelated dimensions of music. Our last music unit of the year focusses on the creation of emotion raps which I’m certain will be a big hit with this current class! Some pupils will also take part in a weekly brass lessons led by our visiting music teacher Mr John Harrop.
PE
Children will continue their weekly PE lesson with ASM on a Tuesday and will also take part in a compulsory swimming lesson every other Thursday.
Homework and spellings
Homework and spellings will continue to be set on a Friday. The Year 4 Home Learning page will keep you informed of the homework task for each week. We will continue to learn a maximum of 15 spellings each week.
