Dear Year 4 and parents,

Welcome back! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas.

English

Our core text for Spring One is the exciting novel The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. This will be used to both inspire the children’s own narrative about a mysterious creature and for the study of diary writing, resulting in children writing a diary entry from the perspective of the character Hogarth. In Spring Two, we will read the picture book Flotsam which will support our learning on writing a synopsis. We will also use the short Disney film Piper to practice some story writing skills, such as dialogue, at the end of term. We will study the audience, purpose and features of each text type and these books will also be used in our guided reading sessions. Our spelling, punctuation and grammar focus for Spring One will be on different forms of tense including simple, progressive and perfect tense. In Spring Two, we will study apostrophes and speech punctuation. Some children in the class will revisit previous phonics learning and all children will receive direct teaching of spelling and 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, so please encourage them to practice regularly at home. One of our maths topics this term is multiplication and division so we will be doing lots of practice in lessons too! Following this, our units will be length and perimeter, fractions and decimals. Children will also receive paper maths homework each Friday.

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, and complete their weekly spelling homework. 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

We will be beginning our exciting new topic on Anglo-Saxons this term. The children will learn about who the Anglo-Saxons were, where they came from and why they wanted to come to Britain. We will study invading and settling, along with ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors which influenced their arrival. Children will immerse themselves in what life was like in a British settlement, studying Anglo-Saxon art and culture and discovering the great treasures of Sutton-Hoo. Moving through history, we will learn about the Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor. Art and DT will be influenced by the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings.

In Science, we will be studying sound and living things and their habitats. Children will be learning about how sounds are made, how sound travels through vibrations and patterns between vibrations, pitch and volume. They will complete investigations to determine the medium through which sound travels best, and which materials are the best insulators of sound. In Spring 2, we will learn about different habitats, how species have adapted to their habitats, and how we can look after and help endangered species. We will also learn all about characteristics and classification of living things, as well as how to use and create our own classification keys. In RE, we will be learning about Hinduism, specifically the importance

of pilgrimage to Hindus. We will learn about what pilgrimage means, why people decide to go on pilgrimage and the effect it has on Hindus.

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. We will check reading records every Thursday in school and will be awarding house points to children who are reading at least three times per week. Re-reading passages, discussing the text, highlighting interesting or unknown vocabulary, and talking around the subject are all very worthwhile activities.

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 weekly Maths and Spelling sheets and two Learning Log activities each term. 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 Thursday (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, trainers, gloves and skins) including spare socks for the girls if they are wearing tights.

Please make sure your child has a coat and a water bottle in school every day, particularly as we are in the colder months.

Thank you for your support.

Miss Borchart