Welcome back to school, I hope you all had a lovely Easter break.

In the summer term, we will be learning all about North and South America. In history, we will discover the sites and secrets of Mayan life. How did the Maya live? Where were they found? What were they known for? Pupils will learn about how the Maya excelled at architecture, agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, mathematics and calendar-making. In geography, we will research and discover North and South America, concentrating on their environmental regions, key physical and human characteristics, countries, major cities, and we will have a close look at the Amazon rainforest.

Our class book this half-term is: The Explorer by Katherine Rundell, an exciting adventure of four children’s survival in the Amazon jungle.

English

We will continue to use The Write Stuff as the basis for our teaching of writing. This term, the children will write an adventure narrative based on, The Whale by Ethan and Vita Murrow, and persuasive letter writing relating to the Amazon rainforest. We will also be using our class novel for narrative writing.

The children will continue to have the opportunity to take a book from the school library on a Thursday. They will take part in a variety of different lessons designed to teach specific comprehension skills, to promote a love of reading for pleasure and use reading as a key tool to support all their learning.

Times Tables

Year 4 are preparing for the Multiplication Tables Check assessment later this term. The Multiplication Times Tables Check is an online test where the pupils are asked 25 questions on times tables 2 to 12. For every question, you have 6 seconds to answer, and in between the questions, there is a 3-second rest. Questions about the 6, 7, 8, 9, and 12 times table come up more often. To supplement the learning of times tables in school, we would be pleased if you would support your child to practise times tables at home. All the children have access to Times Tables Rockstars, and their login details can be found in their Learning Log or Reading record. Rapid recall of times tables is fundamental to much of their Maths learning.

Spelling

There will be a weekly spelling homework on the Spelling Shed website set on a Friday and due to be completed by the following Friday. Again, the children have their login details in their Reading Record. Please encourage them to login 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 spellings and to focus on high frequency words that are being misspelled.

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.

If your child finds decoding tricky, then echo reading is a good strategy. This involves the adult reading a short piece of the text and the child repeating the same passage.

Please see some of the recommended books for Y4

Homework

Homework will be weekly spellings, a Maths task and reading and at various points in the year, a specific one-off Learning Log homework linked to an annual or national event such as World Book Day. It is important that all children complete the homework. Please email us if your child is experiencing any particular difficulties with the completion of homework.

PE

PE will be on a Thursday and a Friday, but is subject to change with weather etc. Please send the kit into school every Monday and it will come home on Friday. Please make sure they have the correct kit for each session including: a jumper, jogging bottoms, shorts, t’shirt, trainers and spare socks.

Water Bottles

Please make sure your child brings in a named water bottle daily.

Thank you for your continued support.

Mrs Thomas