Welcome to Year 4!
It has been wonderful welcoming the children into their new classes this week. Both classes have settled really well and have already demonstrated their positive attitudes to learning with some fantastic work and contributions to discussions!
Newsletter
You should have received a paper copy of our Year 4 newsletter with some useful information for the year ahead. An electronic copy can also be found here:
English
We have begun exploring our new class text, The Firework Maker’s Daughter by Philip Pullman. The children made some excellent predictions, using the front cover to look for clues, before reading the first part of the story. This half term we will be building up to writing explanation texts linked to the story. To help us understand what explanation texts are, we worked in pairs or groups to read an explanation text, a recount and a set of instructions, and try to work out what was similar and different about each text type. The children did really well with this tricky task and made lots of excellent observations.
Maths
Our first unit in maths is place value. We have been looking at numbers up to 1,000 and how they can be represented and partitioned. The children showed a very good understanding of this.
Homework
This week for homework we have sent out the first times tables sheet. Please support your child to practise their times tables. 5 minutes each day on TT Rockstars is a really good way of doing this. Next week we will send home spelling homework in addition to the times tables homework.
Swimming
Swimming lessons will begin on Wednesday next week. I know that lots of children are very excited about going swimming, but please do speak to staff if you have any questions or concerns about swimming lessons. During the first lesson, the instructors will be assessing the swimming ability of each child so that they can place them into the appropriate group. Because of this, each child will only spend a short amount of time in the water. From the following week, children will spend their full lesson swimming in their groups.
Wishing you all a lovely weekend.
The Year 4 Team