Dear Year 4 and parents,

Welcome back! I hope you have had a lovely summer break.

English

We will continue to use The Write Stuff as the basis for our teaching of writing. This term, the children will write adventure narratives based on The Stone Age Boy and poetry relating to the wonderful book, Apes to Zebras. The Wild Robot by Peter Brown will also be our class novel and be used in some guided reading lessons. Some children in the class will revisit previous phonics learning and all children will receive direct teaching of spelling and have the opportunity to practise their handwriting.

The children will continue to have the opportunity to take a book from the school library each week and will take part in a variety of different lessons to teach them specific comprehension skills and to promote a love of reading for pleasure, thereby supporting their learning.

Maths/Times Tables

Please support your child with the rapid recall of times table facts, both multiplication and division. We will be practising times tables regularly in school this year, leading up to the Year 4 Multiplication Tables Check in the summer term. All the children have access to Times Tables Rockstars and their login details can be found in their Reading Record. Maths topics this term are place value, addition and subtraction and area.

Spelling

There will be a weekly spelling homework on the Spelling Shed website. Again, the children have their login details in their Reading Record. Please encourage them to log in and practise. There will be a half-termly test of twenty words taken at random from the previous six weeks’ lists. The children will be encouraged to revise the previous term’s spellings and to focus on high frequency words that are being misspelled.

Other subjects

To begin this exciting year the children will be taken back in time to The Stone Age, the earliest known period of human culture. It is here that the children will start their journey when the earliest hunter-gatherers came to Britain from Europe around 450,000 BC. They will learn the meaning of the word ‘pre-history’ and study the immense change in human development that spanned from the early hunter-gatherers to the more sophisticated and organised groups of the late Iron Age. Children will immerse themselves in what life was like in this time, studying and researching magnificent discoveries such as Skara Brae, the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe and create a brochure about this fascinating place. In Art, we will study and explore different media to create pictures inspired by cave paintings. In Science, we will be studying electricity. Children will be able to identify mains and battery-operated appliances and learn how to construct simple circuits, recognising that all circuits must be complete and contain a power source. In RE, we will be learning about Islam, in particular the Five Pillars of Islam. We will learn what each one means and the role that they play within the Muslim community.

Reading at Home

The children will continue to be able to change their reading book as necessary. We will check to ensure that the books they are choosing are sufficiently challenging and cover a variety of genres. Please continue to read to your child and to listen to them read as often as possible and complete the Reading Record. Re-reading passages, discussing the text, highlighting interesting or unknown vocabulary, and talking around the subject are all very worthwhile activities.

Please see some of the recommended books for Y4

Homework

Homework will continue to be set on a weekly basis, usually on a Friday. Please ask your child to explain the homework to you – it will be a Maths and Spelling challenge on Ed Shed or a Learning Log activity. It is important that all children complete the homework. Please email me if your child is experiencing any difficulties with the completion of the homework.

PE

Our PE days this term are Monday and Friday (this may change due to weather etc.). Please ensure that PE kit is brought into school on a Monday and it will go home on a Friday. We have PE lessons inside and outside, please make sure children have the correct kit for each session (t-shirt, shorts, joggers, jumper, socks and trainers) including spare socks for the girls if they are wearing tights.

Please make sure your child has a sun hat, a raincoat and a water bottle in school every day.

Thank you for your support.

Miss Borchart