Welcome to the Spring Term!

We hope you have all had a fantastic Christmas break and that you are ready to start a new year of learning in year 4.

Our highlight for this term will be our swimming lessons starting on 27th January until 13th February. This is an intensive three week course in which the children will learn how to swim and how to stay safe in the water. We will continue to learn how to play a guitar with Mr Norman and we will have our class assemblies later this term.

We are looking forward to a fun packed term and we look forward to all the opportunities we will be giving you to learn :)

Meet the Year 4 team

Miss. Le Masurier will teach 4KLM.

Mrs Minty and Mrs Primett will teach 4MP.

Mrs Minty will teach 4MP on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday afternoons. Mrs Primett will teach 4MP Wednesday morning, Thursday and Friday all day.

Mrs Minty or Mrs Primett will teach 4KLM every Wednesday morning until break.

Our teaching assistants are Mrs Baker and Mrs Marshall.

Underpinning all our learning and time together is our school values, they are also linked to our Dojo rewards. We will learn about and celebrate examples of each value daily.

Our value for this term is... aspiration

This can be shown by: being independent, working hard to achieve a goal, try something new and by asking questions.

We will be discussing what it means to show aspiration, as well as these 2 key questions.

What do I want to achieve?

How can I work with others to achieve my goals? 

Reading

Reading is a priority at Salisbury Road, therefore we will be practising our reading skills 5x a week using VIPERS to help us. In the classroom, we will use a mixture of choral, echo and ping pong reading, this will enable us to become confident, fluent readers.

Please remember to read at home four times a week to an adult. It is also really important that you record your reading in your reading record so your teacher can see how much you are reading at home. If you have read four times in a week, you will earn a raffle ticket for the reading raffle and have the chance to win a brand new book!

English

This term, the children are going to be writing a balanced argument based on whether they should have a class pet or not.  

We will then move onto playscripts which will involve video stimulus and reading a variety of playscript examples. This will lead to writing our own scene and acting it out.

After half-term, we will be studying stories from other cultures which will link to our history topic on the Early Islamic Civilisation. 

Throughout these units, the children will focus on deepening their knowledge even further on a variety of grammatical components, e.g. word classes, fronted adverbials, prepositions, metaphors, subordinate clauses and expanded noun phrases. 

Maths

This term we will be looking at the place value of numbers up to 1,000, estimation of numbers, fractions, written methods for multiplication and division as well as area and time.

Please don't forget to keep practising your times tables - these are VERY important! If you get your sheet signed for going onto TTRS 4 times-a-week, you will earn a raffle ticket for a wonderful prize.

Challenge yourself to beat your classmates on TTRS.

Science

In spring 1, the children will learn about ‘states of matter’. The children will compare and group materials together, according to whether they are solids, liquids or gases. The children will observe that some materials change state when they are heated or cooled, and measure or research the temperature at which this happens in degrees Celsius (°C). The children will also identify the part played by evaporation and condensation in the water cycle and associate the rate of evaporation with temperature.

In spring 2, the children will identify how sounds are made, associating some of them with something vibrating. The children will recognise that vibrations from sounds travel through a medium to the ear. They will find patterns between the pitch of a sound and features of the object that produced it and they will find patterns between the volume of a sound and the strength of the vibrations that produced it.

 

Geography

This term we will be learning about Tropical Rainforests.

As Geographers, we will be learning about the different layers of the rainforest, the importance of them and how to protect them and the impact of deforestation.

History

This term we will be learning about the Early Islamic Civilisation.

As Historians, we will be discussing about the House of Wisdom, important individuals from this period of History, Baghdad and medicine. 

Homework

Homework will be given to the children every Tuesday and will either consolidate their learning in school or extend their learning further. It will be expected back to school on the following Monday. 

Sometimes, the homework may need to be completed via teams and other times it may be on paper or be a project to complete. 

If you ever have any concerns about your child's homework, please speak to their class teacher. 

Year 4 Spelling

Children will receive weekly spellings with their test taking place on a Monday. 

Each week, they will have six spellings which follow the current rule they are learning and the other four words will comprise from the statutory list from the national curriculum. 

We will teach the children strategies which will help them to learn their spellings. 

** For the children having phonics sessions, they will be given a list of spellings by their phonics teacher each week**

PE

4KLM and 4MP will have PE on a Wednesday afternoon. However, this occasionally may change so please ensure they have their PE kit in school every day.