We’ve only 1 more week to go! How crazy is that? It was great to see so many of you at the Christmas Fair, and also to have had the best wintery weather we could have hoped for. Year 4 have been hard at work preparing for our Christmas performances but they are still giving everything 100% so let’s see what we’ve been learning this week.

English

In English this week we have been looking at different types of poetry and what distinguishes them from one another. We have looked at poems focused on syllables like Haikus and Tankas; poems based on rhythm and rhyme like limericks and also trying to add in rhyming structure to acrostic poems.
Year 4 have done brilliantly with this poetry and have created some beautiful wintery and Christmassy poems, some of which you will hear in our church performance next week.

 

Maths

We began our maths this week by looking at line graphs, how to interpret them and draw them. There were lots of similarities between line graphs and bar graphs such as the axes, labels and titles but we found that plotting the data was done very differently.

We then moved on to estimating and converting units of length. This was great fun as we had to estimate the length of objects around the room using our mental image of a ruler as a reference and then we got to see how close we were. Sometimes we were way off but then we learnt we could use our knowledge of the actual length of what we’d just measured as another point of reference. For instance, if we figured out a pencil was 17cm long and a ruler was 30cm long, then we would know that something that was bigger than a pencil but smaller than a ruler would have to be between 17 and 30cm.

Next week we will be looking at solving some real world problems involving measurements of length.

 

Thematic

This week we looked at food chains and food webs and asked ‘What would happen is a part of the chain disappeared?’. In the example below, for instance, if the rabbits suddenly disappeared, the foxes would begin to die out as their food source was gone, which, in turn, would cause the lions to die out. The carrots on the other hand would flourish as there would be nothing to eat them.#

 

 

Next week we will be moving on to RE and learning about why the nativity story is so important to Christians.

 

Spellings

Due to our Christmas activities and performances next week, there will be no spellings to practise this week.

 

Love to Learn

As we have been measuring in Maths this week, we’d love you to go around your house and estimate the lengths of things you find. Write down how long you think it is (make sure to include your units) and then find a rules or tape measure and find out the actual length.

Challenge: Can you combine your measuring knowledge with your knowledge of perimeters? Measure the length of all the walls in one room of your house. Draw a diagram of that room and then calculate the room’s perimeter.

 

Dates to remember:

 17th December – Year 3 and 4 Church performance at 2pm

19th December – Year 3, 4, 5 and 6 Christmas party day (party clothes to be worn)

20th December – Christmas jumper day (children can wear usual school uniform with a Christmas jumper)

20th December – School Christmas dinner

20th December – Last day of school; School finishes at 2pm; No after school club on this day

 

Many thanks

We hope you have a lovely weekend.

Mrs Cousins, Mr Oxley and Mrs Tammaro