Welcome to Year 4! We are sure that our Year 4 children will settle into school life quickly and continue to work hard to produce more independent and detailed work. We will be giving the children more responsibility in school and we will expect a greater amount of personal organisation to help them to develop as individuals.

Religious Education

 In R.E. we will be following the new Religious Education Directory 'To Know You More Clearly' and using 'The Magister' scheme to support this. Our first topic we will cover is 'Creation and Covenant' where we will explore deeper into the Old Testament specifically following the life and promises given to Abraham and Joseph (the son of Jacob with the coat of many colours). 

The second topic we will cover is 'Prophecy + Promise' where we will continue to explore the Old Testament through Elijah and John the Baptist and then bring ourselves into the New Testament when we looking at Advent and the birth of Jesus. 

In Year 4, the children also lead the school's Harvest Service. We will prepare and learn about the importance of Harvest and share this with our school and local community in Church.

P.S.H.E

In Autumn 1, the children will be looking at the topic of 'Religious Understanding' through the use of the TenTen Resources. The children will explore the Gospel story of Jairus' Daughter where they will learn that they are designed for a purpose and how they should live in light of this. 

In Autumn 2, the children will be having the delivery of KidSafe UK by Mrs Ronson. 'KidSafe UK is a leading provider of children’s mental health and safeguarding training for schools and has helped hundreds of schools across the UK, from EYFS to Y6, to deliver age-appropriate, engaging, fun and effective safeguarding programmes to their pupils.' - KidSafe UK Website

English

In the first half term our theme will be the Loch Ness Monster. We will be exploring whether the Loch Ness Monster is real or fake, creating an article to present our research. We will also focus on adventure stories using 'The Treasure of the Loch Ness Monster' by Lari Don and also 'The Family Ness' cartoon as our basis for creating our own adventure story.

In the second half of this term, we will first look at writing our own fairytales. We will look at the different features fairytales use identifying similarities in themes and structure. To support our learning we will use the fairytale 'The Pied Piper'. They will also recount events through newspaper articles and learn a narrative poem by heart and perform it.  

Throughout our English lessons we will immerse the children in different styles of writing using children's fiction and non-fiction texts as sources for our writing. We will be concentrating on punctuation: full stops, capital letters, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, apostrophes and inverted commas. We will be linking spelling and handwriting activities to develop a good cursive handwriting style.  

In addition, in the first half term our whole class guided reading text will be 'The Water Horse' by Dick King-Smith and in the second half term it will be 'The Butterfly Lion' by Michael Morpurgo. We will base our comprehension work around this text.

Spellings will be sent home on Fridays and tested the following Friday. 

Mathematics

In Maths our number work, both mental and written, will focus on place value, addition and subtraction, perimeter and multiplication and division. 

We will continue our focus within school of our 1-12 times tables in preparation for the times table check in the Summer Term.

Science

During the first half term in Science we will look at the topic of 'Biology: Classifying Organisms'. Pupils will be taught to:

- recognise that living things can be grouped in a variety of ways. 

- explore and use classification keys to help group, identify and name a variety of living things in their local and wider environment. 

- recognise that environments can change and that this can sometimes pose dangers to living things.

In the second half term, we will look at the topic of 'Biology: Food and Digestion.' Pupils will be taught to:

- describe the simple functions of the basic parts of the digestive system in humans.

- identify the different types of teeth in humans and their simple functions.

- construct and interpret a variety of food chains, identifying producers, predators and prey.

Throughout science we will be conducting experiments to support our learning, whilst also understanding how to write up our findings.

Geography and History

In the first half term, we will be doing Geography. Our topic will be '

Art and DT

In the first half term our Art topic will be, 'Pattern and Pumpkins'. The children will learn about the artist Yayoi Kusama who often uses pumpkins as the inspiration for her work. The children will use clay to create their own 3D form of a pumpkin and learn about collagraphic printmaking to decorate their pumpkins.

In the second half term our D.T. topic will be, 'Food: Soups'. The children will learn what are seasonings and how they can add to the taste of foods, the variety of ingredients that soups contain and they will also have a go at making soups including looking at food safety and hygiene. 

P.E. and Games

Autumn 1 -

- Swimming

• swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
• use a range of strokes effectively [for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke]
• perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

- Gymnastics Core Task 1

Autumn 2 - 

- Swimming

• swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
• use a range of strokes effectively [for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke]
• perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

- Dance - 'Sparks Might Fly' which links into our science topic for the previous half term of 'Electricity'. 

Music

In music, we will be focusing our attention on the music from 'Mamma Mia' learning to sing the songs and also learn how to play the glockenspiel through the use of Charanga. We will also be focusing on our knowledge of musical theory e.g. looking at the different types of notes and their length, pulse, pitch etc. We will also be practicing our singing for our Harvest Festival. 

Computing

Autumn 1 -  'Computing Systems and Networks - The Internet'

Autumn 2 -  'Creating Media - Audio Production' 

I look forward to your continued support in this very busy term.               

Miss Parkinson