Welcome to Year 4!

Mr Hicklin, Miss Higginbotham and Miss Lillis

Our Topic this half term is “Read all about it.” We will be looking into the world of journalism, investigating newspapers and news reports.

Homework: find and bring in an interesting or funny story from a newspaper.

Mondays will be our PE day. 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.

Swimming will be on Wednesday afternoons. Please send us a letter if you want your child to wear goggles. It is essential that we have a raincoat or warm coat every Wednesday. It may also be better to leave your jewellery at home for the day.​

In English this half term we will be looking at:

Newspaper reporting

In Maths we will be looking at  fractions and decimals.

Homework

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.

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.

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).

 We also now have the exciting times table rock stars

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

The excellent Newsround

 Fractions:

Fraction matcher

Monty's math wall

and our old favourite, Daily ten!

Place value- using numberlines

                  - ordering three digit numbers

Please note- these links will take you away from the Oldswinford CE Primary website- we urge you to check ahead for unsuitable adverts on YouTube.

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 Romans are more your thing.....Don't forget Wall, Roman site and Wroxeter (with recreated villa) as well as Chedworth in Gloucestershire (amazing mosaics). Miss H went to Bath in the summer holiday (the place not that once yearly thing!) she had a fabulous time looking at the range of artefacts there. If you fancy wider travels- the Ashmolean Museum and British Museums were her regular haunts at university. If you want to blow the budget, why not head straight for Rome (Miss H hasn't made it there yet)!

Magnets and their invisible force 

How do magnets work in a scrap yard 

A journey into the digestive system (YouTube link)