Updated: 18/4/21
Welcome to Year 4!
Welcome back!!!
We hope you have enjoyed your time away from school and made the most of the lovely weather.
We will be starting back with a huge push on your times tables, handwriting and spelling so be ready. These will also be forming a large part of your homework, with you expected to be learning them at home as much as you can. This will help you massively for the rest of this year, and as you move onto Year 5 and beyond.
June will see you taking the Multiplication Tables Check, where you will be give 25 questions, picked at random from any of the tables facts , up to 12x12, and only allowed 6 seconds to answer, so you need to know them by heart!
We hope you are looking forward to this term as much as us!
Best wishes,
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 beautifully illustrated and written poetry book 'A River' by Marc Martin. This begins our Water Worlds topic and looks at the journey of a river through the poem. We will be looking at poetry features and using this to create our own poems based on part of the river's journey from source to sea.
In guided reading, we will be using a range of texts 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 decimals. We continue building upon the learning from last term, looking at how we can compare and order decimals in different ways, using different representations.
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.