Dear Parents and Carers,

We have spent the final week of term focusing on the following:

Literacy: We concluded our work on ‘The Wishgranter’. We created, and then edited, an alternative ending for the story before moving on to some SPaG work, first focusing on apostrophes and learning about the difference between ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’. When we return, we will be studying the novel ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes.

Maths: Some more column subtraction – focusing on the concept of borrowing and exchanging – before we used our rounding skills to help us estimate answers and thought of useful ways to check and refine our working out strategies. After the break, we will begin looking at multiplication and division.

Spelling: We looked at our first suffixes of the year this week: ‘ate’ and ‘ion’. The words were: vibration, generation, coronation, donation, illustration, detonation, information, population, decoration and location.

Guided Reading: We studied a piece about tectonic plates and used our retrieval skills to find and copy certain words. We also used the information in the text to answer some ‘true or false’ questions.

Music: We added some more notes to our compositions from last week.

Science: The children learnt about the late Gerald Durrell, the man who did lots of good things to help endangered species and opened Jersey Zoo.

Art: The children did some nice layered drawings, with a particular emphasis on shading techniques.

PE: The rain interfered with our rugby session this week, so we replaced it with an impromptu circuits session to work on our fitness levels. In hockey we played in some small-sided matches with the ‘all-in’ rule – meaning there did not need to be a certain number of touches per player or passes before a shot could be taken.

Topic: In our final lesson on Extreme Earth, we learnt about droughts, what causes them and how this affects us.

RE: Christianity again this week. We discussed the Ten Commandments and why Christians believe these are important to live by.

Computing: We spent this week’s lesson putting the finishing touches to our own Scratch games.

Interhouse Challenge: Several members of each class took on the ever-popular ‘pasta challenge’ in our Interhouse Challenge for this term. Contestants had one minute to move as many pieces of pasta as they could from one container to another using only a pair of chopsticks. The results will appear in an edition if the newsletter in the coming weeks.

Half Term Homework:

There will be no homework set over half term. If your child wishes to read or play any TTRS or Spelling Shed games during the break, they just need to let us know when they return to school and we will have a look at what they have done.

Your children have been wonderful to teach this term, and have made a great start to their new school year. We wish them (and you) a fun and restful break, and we will see you at the start of Term 2.

The Y4 Team