In our English lessons, we have covered a range of topics including explanation texts and nonsense poems. The children seemed to particularly enjoy our topic of nonsense poems where they created their own nonsense poem in the style of The Michael Rosen Rap and then had the opportunity to perform their creation to the rest of the class! They were also fascinated to learn all about recycling and its benefits in order to write their own explanation text! They were able to include a lot of the grammatical features that we have learnt about, including fronted adverbials, cause and effect conjunctions, expanded noun phrases and separated all of their writing into paragraphs with headings!
During our whole class reading lessons, we have been reading and discussing The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpurgo. The children loved the story and we have had some wonderful discussions about how the main character, Bertie, might have been feeling at certain points in his life. We were all very surprised by the ending and had lots of ideas about it! Once we had finished the book, the children all created a book review explaining what the book was about (without revealing any spoilers) and what their favourite part was.
In Maths, the children began the new year by finishing off our multiplication and division topic. We looked at multiplying and dividing 3 digit numbers by 1 digit. We also developed our ability to find factor pairs of certain numbers. This is a very valuable skill in maths and will continue to help us with all of our maths topics. We then moved on to looking at length and perimeter and found that the children could recall a lot from their learning in Year 3 – which is fantastic!
During our Geography lessons, we discovered some budding geography experts in Year 4! Our focus was all about mountains and mountain ranges in Europe. The children enjoyed finding out about all the different types of mountains and how they were formed. They also loved using Google Maps to explore different locations and then mark them on their own maps.
In Art, the children learned about Islamic patterns. The children researched different elements of Islamic art such as calligraphy, geometric patterns, vegetal (relating to plants) and repetition of patterns. They particularly enjoyed discovering that most Islamic art will have a small deliberate mistake to show that nobody is perfect! After creating their final design, the children then made a printing tile out of string and card and used it to print a repeating pattern into their books. We have all enjoyed this topic as we have been able to use a range of different mediums such as pencils, string and printing ink! The final task involved evaluating their work by recognising what worked well, what could be improved next time and what they had learned throughout the project.
In Science, the children have loved learning all about electricity and creating simple circuits out of bulbs, wires and cells. We even tested which switch works best in order to switch our light bulb on the quickest! The children are looking forward to applying their new found skills to creating electric board games next half term!