Happy New Year to all of our Year 4 families! We hope you have had a wonderful Christmas break. 

 

The Year 4 team had a really productive INSET on Monday, as we were beginning to plan our brand new project that will take place in Summer 1. We are very excited about it and we're all looking forward to sharing the lessons with the children.

 

This week we have been starting some new units of work in a range of subjects, as well as continuing our maths topic of multiplication and division which we started in December. The children all learnt the 'finger trick' to work out their 9 x table - do ask your child to show you! We then went deeper by looking at other patterns we can spot (e.g. the digit sum is always 9 or a multiple of 9), and how the 3, 6 and 9 x table are connected. 

 

In English we began our work on 'Fox and the deep sea quest'. The children made predictions about the book using evidence from the cover and got to know about the character of Fox using their inference skills. We then read the book together as a class. We will go on over the next two weeks to describe an exciting journey through many underwater habitats using evocative descriptions, ready to share with the Natural History Museum.

 

We also began a new book in our Reading lessons - Harklights by Tim Tilley. The children loved unpicking the beautiful cover illustrations and are excited to become immersed in this wonderful book. 

 

Our history lesson this week helped the children to put their Ancient Egypt knowledge into a wider context as we explored other great ancient civilisations. Here are a few quiz questions for you: 

1) Why were ox bones important to the people of the Shang dynasty?

2) Who invented the 60 minute clock?

3) What was special about the cities of the Indus Valley?

 

Have a lovely weekend,

The Year 4 Team