This week Year 4 started their brand new topic and have been listening to music from many different eras! We also chose our favourite songs and created a class playlist to listen to as we learn! What else have we been learning this week? 

English

We read the story, 'The Pedlar of Swaffham' which is an English tale that takes us back in time. We wrote historical settings about London Bridge, imagining the sights and smells of busy, bustling streets. We made fantastic 2d and 3d art pieces to help with our descriptions then used a range of vocabulary and figurative language to describe the scene. We also thought about how our character would react to the scene. Our BIG WRITE then challenged us to use all of these skills to describe a scene in Ancient Egypt!

Next week we will be reading the story, 'The Blind Man and the Hunter' and using this text to help us tell stories, role play and write in role. 

Maths

This week we have challenged ourselves with some really tricky concepts. We learnt about distributive law and associative law and learnt how our multiplication problems can be broken down, moved around and solved in easier ways! We also reminded ourselves of how to use the bus stop method for division and solved some challenging problems using our understanding of multiplication patterns.

Next week we will be learning about the relationship between fractions, decimals and percentages.

Topic

This week we began our topic, 'Make some noise' and started with History learning. We went back in time to the 1400s and listened to renaissance music and we went through the eras, enjoying music from baroque era, classical, romantic and then modern. We noticed how the instruments and styles of music changed and we created time lines to show the different periods. On Friday we moved on to music in the 20th century, from the swinging sixties all the way to the girl and boy bands of the 00s. It was great fun and the children enjoyed learning about their favourite artists from these periods. 

Next week we will be learning about the science of music  - how sounds are made and how we hear them. We can't wait to investigate!

Notices

• Attached is a Rotary art competition. It would be great to have as many Year 4s take part as possible -we did so well last time!
• Number day is on the 4th February! This will be a day filled with fun maths activities but the children can dress up number or rock star themed :)

• On Friday 11th February, we will be celebrating children's mental health day. This will be running on from our work through online safety week. Children and staff will be invited to 'Dress to express', wearing bright colours to school. This is for awareness.

LOVE TO LEARN

• We are really working on our times tables recall in Year 4. Please choose your most tricky times table (6s for me!) and practise, practise, practise! Make a poster to show your times table and bring it in so we can display them on our maths wall.
• Common exception words - We are learning to spell the words attached below. Please practise as much as possible.

Thank you for your ongoing support, 

The Year 4 Team