Welcome to Year 4!

 Miss Higginbotham, Mr Hicklin and Mrs Perks

Our Topic for this last half term is "Into the forest” looking at habitats, food chains and stories with a foresty feel! 

In English this half term we will be looking at:

Story writing and Persuasive writing.

In Maths we will be looking at Statistics, the properties of shapes and movement.

Our PE days are Wednesday and Thursday, from January, you can come to school in your PE kit and wear it all day. 

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.

Books are collected in on a Friday and new ones chosen on a Monday. Be sure to do your online Reading Planet quiz before Friday.

Spellings. The children complete a wide variety of spelling tasks in school. They will be given a set of spellings to learn every week (usually on a Monday) and will use them in skills throughout the week.

Maths

Children each have a Mathletics account. The tasks always compliment class work, and are usually set on a fortnightly basis. It either goes just before, whilst or after we do the work in class. It is set out at White Rose maths. Definitely complete these activities with a whiteboard or piece of paper nearby to help. 
You can either do these set activities in one go, one every day or a mixture of the two.
 

If you  have a mobile device, there is a free app to download. It is also available through most web browsers.

https://www.mathletics.com/uk/.

There is also Times table Rockstars This sets specific tables according to your speed and accuracy, and is incredibly useful for building speed. This is best used as a little but often. https://ttrockstars.com/

passwords can be found in the cover of your reading records/ home reading diaries.

This year we will be concentrating on counting and tables facts. We will be learning and testing these each week (usually on a Tuesday). 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).

https://www.timestables.co.uk/ has a lot of adverts but is very useful and is the home of the best example test of what the children are expected to do in June.
https://www.timestables.co.uk/multiplication-tables-check/

Daily ten- https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/daily10 is a very useful tool for tables practice with pencil and paper and also can be used for other speedy maths skills.

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

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.

A journey into the digestive system (YouTube link)