Yr4 Curriculum Update – 23/03/18
Working together to achieve success for every child
Dear Parents,
Thank you for attending the student led conferences last week, it was lovely to see how well the students were able to share their learning with you. We hope that you enjoyed yourselves and that the conference provided useful insight into how your child learns.
This week the students have been very busy completing their final pieces of art work for our How We Express Ourselves unit and reflecting on what they have learned. We have also begun our new unit, How The World Works on how ‘simple machines help us do work’. The students have enjoyed beginning to find out about the three main simple machines – levers, wheels and axles and inclined planes through doing research and participating in demonstrations. They have also used their analysis skills to look at some everyday tools to identify the parts that make them up, the purpose of each part and how they work together in the tool.
In language students have enjoyed completing various types of poetry including cinquains, haikus, kennings and rhyming couplets. Students have developed their descriptive vocabulary in terms of using adverbs, adjectives, similes and metaphors. We certainly enjoyed reading all of the contributions to the Haiku Tree that students and parents made during the student led conferences. Many of the Year 4 teachers have now moved on to analysing what goes into making an explanation text. We will continue on with examining and writing an explanation text in the coming weeks.
In reading we have been noticing the questions we ask as we read. Some classes are continuing to synthesise their ideas about who ate the feast in the book the Eleventh Hour using the clues in the book to find the culprit!
In Maths the children have continued to develop their skills in algebra by furthering their understanding of the equals sign to balance calculations and apply their knowledge of inverse operations to solve number problems. They have moved on to identify and describe patterns in numbers and sequences using algebraic terms and even begun to write formulae that can describe any position in a sequence.
How you can help
We are investigating simple machines and will attempt to make some! If you could save your bottle tops, plastic bottles, plastic containers that kind of thing, basically before you throw something away if you think it could be used to build or be part of a simple machine, could you keep it (wash it if needed) and send it in with your child. Many Thanks.
A date for your diaries:
The end of term is next Thursday 29th March at 2:45. The summer term starts on April 16th.
Remember if you have any concerns or questions about your child’s learning and wellbeing at school please contact your child’s teacher in the first instance
Kind Regards
Team Year 4.
Family construction at the Student Led Conference
