• TASK for 10th May-  Make yourself a model of a dragon- no bigger than 30cm x 30cm- details on Class Dojo
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• Welcome to Year 4!

Mr Hicklin and Miss Higginbotham

Our Topic this half term is “From the Flames.” We will be thinking about how fire changes materials and how Flames have changed the fortune of our local area. We will also look at how Dragons have entered popular culture and write stories about them.

Some videos you might enjoy:

Mr Benn- The Red Knight

How glass is made

Supermovers times tables

Mondays and Wednesdays will be our PE days. Ensure you have your sports kits for indoor and outside lessons.​

Tuesday- the very exciting WCIT in which every member of Year Four will be playing either cornet or clarinet. (Don't forget to leave a pound coin in your case, clarinet players, in case you need a new reed). Every child has been given a log on for the Charanga website. Here, Mrs Bayliss and Mr Henton put their music so they can practice at home (complete with backing tracks). There are also some very fun games which teach you about your instrument, music theory and the history of music too. Well worth a look!

Forest schools will be on a Thursday morning and will be on a rota this year.

In Maths we will be looking at  Decimals and Money

When you are learning your tables, why not throw in some “¼ of 16? And ½ of 30?” Questions to make some links.

Homework

The Year Four Readathon will continue this term. You must read as many pages as you can, to an adult, who will sign your book mark. You can only read 2 of a particular type of book (eg only two Diary of a Wimpy Kid books)

Doing a bit of extra work at home can really help with our work in class.

Try to read every day at home. If your child is good at reading independently, you can ask them for a summary of the plot on the days you don’t hear them read. Talk about what you have read and have a competition to guess what might happen next. It is fine to work as a team - it can be fun to read a sentence or page each if it is a challenging book that they are desperate to read.

We are really looking for deeper meaning in the text. In reading sessions at school, the children have been writing their own questions, some pure retrieval of information (eg, “What was the man wearing on his back?”- a parachute), some with more challenging inference questions (e.g. “Why did the man jump off the building?”- in the previous paragraph it had said he needed to get their very quickly). We’ve even tried this with photographs too. It is great fun!

Spellings. The children complete a wide variety of spelling tasks in school. They will be given a set of spellings to learn every week, to be tested the following week.

Maths

Children each have a Mathletics account. The tasks always compliment class work, and are usually set on a fortnightly basis. If you have a mobile device, there is a free app to download. It is also available through most web browsers. There is a computer club one dinner time a week which will allow your child to practice on school equipment if you are suffering from technological problems.

Children get chance to complete a Number Hero sheet every week- to help them to join the next ‘club’.

This year we will be concentrating on counting and tables facts. We will be learning and testing these each week. For a challenge, you can even learn the division facts to match! You might like to try this website for a different way to learn your tables. Update: Try this fab new app! My team of tables novices have been trying this out, and the verdict- it is great! It's called Ten Minutes a day Time Tables from DK- here's a link. You can download it on android link and Ios (link).

Suggested additional learning activities

Card games can be a really good way of practicing counting. Why not try one of our new favourite games? Arrange your cards into a spiral. Take turns to roll a dice, and advance by the number of cards you rolled. To stay there- you need to calculate the value of the card by the value on the dice. If you get it wrong, you need to go back to where you were before you last rolled- or if you like a challenge- to the start! If someone else lands on your card and completes the calculation successfully, you are sent back to the start! Enjoy!

Dice games. There are lots of different variations or dice games. It can be really fun to multiply the scores on two (or even three) dice together. Another favourite in Year Four is to write 0-12 and cross off the numbers as you roll two dice- for example 6 and 2 could make 8 (6+2), 4 (6-2) 12 (6x2) or 3 (6 divided by 2). This one makes a fun two player game as you can see who has crossed off most squares once they have all gone, or you can have a set of numbers each and see who gets all of the numbers first. For advanced players you could also include 4.5, 3.5, 2.5, 1.5 etc for halving odd numbers.​

We love throwing three die (or one dice, three times) to produce a three digit number and rounding it to the nearest ten or hundred. For something simpler, try two dice and for a challenge, add a decimal point! We like to use a game board and challenge each other to cover up the rounded numbers as this also lets us practice place value (the digits 2,3,4 could round to 230, 240, 320, 340 420 or 430 if one of the other variants has been taken by our opponent)​.

Videos

Here are some videos you might find useful

For a nice walk through time:

try this

for the Stone age:

this

for electricity:

this

If you fancy a more practical approach to history, why not go on an outing. There are lots of old hill forts in this area including Wychbury Hill, British Camp (at Malvern) and the really interesting rock houses at Kinver.

If the Romans are more your thing, try: