Updated: 20/1/21
Welcome to Year 4!
Home Learning Amendment 08.01.2021
Primary schools have had further guidance on home learning issued from the Government this week. Most of these guidelines we were already covering which is great, however we have needed to make a few tweaks for next week. The weekly home learning can be accessed just as before by clicking on the relevant week's 'star'. There will now be a 'star' for each day of the week which if you click, will show you what learning the children should be doing for that particular day. For each week there will also be a timetable showing a schedule of learning and a description of the activity. This completely mirrors the learning that we will be doing in school, great for children who are accessing Educare on an infrequent basis throughout the week. Please access this learning how you wish, therefore if you want to do maths for a day and then a day of topic learning, that is absolutely fine. It is up to you how you manage it. As always, if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us via the email addresses below.
Best wishes, keep safe,
The Year 4 team.
Welcome back to online learning!
Following the government announcement (4.1.21) that all schools must return to online learning we unfortunately find ourselves back in the situation we were in the Spring term of last year.
Overwhelmingly, the feedback from the last time was that the way Manadon arranged our online learning was very positive and that it worked for the vast majority of our pupils. Because of this, we will be placing a block of learning at a time on to each year group page, ready for Monday. This should be completed by all children across the course of the week.
One area that arose from feedback was the wish to have some contact with class teachers and classmates. To enable this we are going to host a 20-30 minute Zoom call each week so that we can all see each other. There will not be any formal lesson teaching during this time.
If you have any immediate concerns or questions, please feel free to contact us via e-mail (see below). We will endeavour to reply as soon as possible but we are teaching the key worker children and may not get back to you straight away.
Mr Easterbrook - jeasterbrook@mvps.org.uk
Mrs Coulton - hcoulton@mvps.org.uk
Best of luck and we hope to see you soon.
All of the Year 4 Team
Self-isolation / instant lockdown activities
Should anyone have to enter a period of isolation, we have added more activities to our learning links for Key Skills. You will find areas for English and Maths. At the bottom of the page there are more activities linked to the topics too.
If you have any questions, please contact us and we will try to help out the best that we can.
General Information
Welcome to the Year 4 page. You will find all of the things you should need to know for the year.
In Year 4 the teachers are Mr Easterbrook and Mrs Coulton. We are supported by Miss Friend, Mrs Godfrey and Miss Gee, who are our teaching assistants.
Year 4 is a key year and involves the children taking greater responsibility for their own learning. Despite this we are very keen to work together as a partnership, with the children, parents, teachers and school of all working together to help us 'to be the best that we can be'.
Please feel free to contact the Year 4 team if you have something you wish to ask or would like to discuss. We have an open door policy and will see you as soon as possible. Please ask at the office if you would like to see us in person or would like to pass on a message, or catch us in the playground at the start or end of the day.
Thank you,
The Year 4 Team
Home learning
SEE REVISED NOTE ABOUT HOME LEARNING ABOVE
PE Kit and days
Planning Days
Year 4 Term overview
English
Current learning
We are going to be using the amazing books of Kate Pankhurst, especially the 'Fantastically Great Women who changed the world' along with the other books in the series. We will be learning how these inspirational ladies changed the course of the world, even at times when they were seen as a second class of citizen in their time. We will look at the lives and achievements of authors, athletes, scientists and activists who have shaped the world in which we live in today.
In guided reading, we will be using the books from English to look at the skills of finding and retrieving information, a skill which is essential for the assessment of reading. We will also be using some short texts to start to develop the skills of inference and deduction, much more challenging skills that are expected to develop as the children become more confident and fluent readers.
Reading
On our return, all children are heard reading and we will decide if they need to remian on the reading scheme, and at which level, or if they should be a free-reader.
Regular reading at home is essential. The children should be heard reading aloud at least 3 times per week, even for those children who are free-readers. Discussions between the child and the adult are key to helping to improve and develop their understanding but also allows the children to work on their expression when reading aloud.
Free readers may read anything they like but we would like you to always have a challenging fiction book on the go at all times. We are more than happy to recommend texts for you.
Children on the reading scheme must read their scheme books but can also add any additional reading you have done (non-fiction, magazines, other books etc).
Each child has their own reading record and these need to be completed with three adult signed entries per week, indicating when the child read, what they read and anything that arose from the discussion. If the record has been misplaced or left at school, the entries should be completed on a piece of paper, which can be stuck into the book.
We have given Year 4 access to Oxford Owl and the reading materials within their website. This wonderful resource has a small range of texts and extracts that the children can read on a digital screen, choosing to read the text themselves, or allowing the text to be read to them and for them to follow along. This is a useful resource if your child has forgotten their reading book, or if you would like a different text to one that you have already. The login details are in the front of the reading record and can be found on the Year 4 'Welcome to Year 4' PowerPoint/PDF.
Spellings
Spellings will be handed out on a Friday and tested on the following Thursday. We will teach the spellings patterns and rules throughout the week. These are to be found on the spelling section below.
Handwriting
Throughout the week we will ask the children to practise their spellings through handwriting. Part of the curriculum expects all children to be joining their handwriting.
We keep the children's best handwriting on their tables so that they are always trying to improve their work to be the best that it can be.
Maths
Current Learning
Our current focus is on multiplication and division skills. We will be going back through the times tables and looking at how we can use these to support us when solving larger problems that require different methods that just knowing our table facts. We will look at a variety of strategies in the build-up to eventually using the formal written method for multiplying up to 3 or 4-digit numbers by a single number.
Times tables facts
The national expectation for Year 4 is that ALL children will know every times table fact from 1x1 to 12x12 by heart and with instant recall. The Government were due to introduce a national assessemnet of this skill last year and it was last year's Year 4s who were due to be the first year group to be assessed on their times table fact knowledge. Obviously, this did not happen, so it will now be this year group.
As a school, we piloted the process in the year before and our pupils performed incredibly well and this was in main due to regular learning at home of the tables, either through playing the TTRockstars app or by repeated questioning by others. Both can be a fun way to learn and enhance the knowledge of the tables, making all of their maths skills much quicker and accurate. The only way to embed this essential skill is to repeatedly practise them. Just a few minutes learning them each day will have a massive impact. Our best mathematicians know all of their tables by heart and it will be invaluable for moving into Year 5 and beyond.
All children have been provided with their own TTRockstars username and password. It would be helpful if they could learn these so that they can use them at home, but also in school, where we will be using the app to keep our skills topped up.
There will also be regular competitions held between the classes and certain groups of children. We hope that you encourage the children to take part.
In Year 4, the expectations in maths have changed significantly. The new curriculum focuses heavily on calculation strategies, particularly for addition, subtraction and multiplication. We also start to develop our division skills, so it is essential that the children work at learning these at home. They are a key life skill which will be essential throughout adulthood.
We are having a huge push on our times tables at the moment as it forms a key part of what we must know to move forwards in our learning. We would really appreciate any help with the learning of this key skill please. If you need some help with suggestions, please see the resources below or come and ask one of the team for some support.
RE
For our RE lessons in Year 4 we study Christianity and Hinduism.
Below is a copy of the units of work we follow and use.