Year 4

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Welcome to Year 4!

On this page, we will share important dates and information for reference throughout the year, as well as celebrating the fantastic learning happening in Year 4.

Year 4 Staff Team:
Mrs C Widdett (4W Class Teacher and Lower Key Stage 2 Phase Leader)
Miss B Sharrock (4S Class Teacher)
Mr N Edensor (4W Class Teacher)
Mrs K Leicester (Teaching Assistant)
Miss M Salem (Teaching Assistant)

Important Information
Here, we will post important dates and information.

Please ensure children are equipped with kit for both indoor and outdoor lessons. Where children have ear piercings, they must remove these for PE and be capable of taking out their own jewellery. Please see our uniform policy for further information. Both classes will go swimming on Friday mornings. Our other P.E lesson will be on a Monday afternoon.

Y4 have violin lessons. 4S will have these lessons and a Wednesday afternoon until February half term. 4W will then resume lessons until the end of the academic year.

Summer Term

We are now halfway through our final term in Year 4 and the children just keep going from strength to strength! In just 7 short weeks, they'll be off for their new Year 5 adventure.

English

This half term, Year 4 have been immersed in a new text that has never been a part of the Leasowes Reading Spine before: Honesty & Lies by Eloise Williams tells the story of Honesty, a young Welsh girl who arrives in Tudor London fleeing from an unsuitable marriage. There, she meets Alice, a maid at Greenwich Palace serving no other than Queen Elizabeth I. Alice is hiding a terrible secret which threatens to endanger the lives of herself, Honesty and even the Queen. Children have loved the text as it adds further context to our current History unit, The Tudors.

History

Speaking of The Tudors, we are well underway learning about this treasonous, dramatic time in British History. We have studied how the Tudors lived very differently in contrast to our previous history focuses, the Vikings, and charted the events of the Battle of Bosworth which led to Henry VII's coronation and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. We scrutinised his family tree and the many wives of his son, Henry VIII. Children completed fantastic homework projects about one or more of this doomed wives; they are now on proud display in our Y3/4 corridor. After half term, we are going to be looking more closely at the real people of the Tudor times, including looking at the under-represented Black history and how ordinary people, rich and poor alike, lived during this time. This is always a popular unit in Year 4 due to the drama, the backstabbing of the royals in power and the contrast to how we live our lives today.

Maths

We are now just short weeks away from our Multiplication Table Check. Children have made such outstanding progress in this hugely important area of maths. While of course children are so proud to get that score as high as possible, what we are especially pleased with is the way children are able to apply their increasingly secure knowledge of times tables: they are more efficient, accurate and confident when tackling their maths in lessons. As children approach their transition to UKS2, this will only serve to support them as the curriculum grows more challenging. We are all so proud of all of Year 4!

Spring Term

Wow! We cannot believe how quickly this year is flying. We are now halfway through the year and things just keep keep getting better and better!

At the moment, the main buzz in Year 4 is for the Statutory Multiplication Check. Fluency in times tables is an essential tool to succeed and achieve in the UKS2 maths curriculum and beyond, so we all take this super seriously to aim for greatness. As part of this, we were recently thrilled to invite parents and carers along to a Family Learning session to showcase our approach to practising our tables. In the early part of the session, Year 4 staff presented the information around June's MTC check to parents - please see information at the bottom of this page if you missed it! Then, the fun bit: adults were invited to carousel around the hall to play the range of games Year 4 children access daily to practice their tables. Activities included bingo balls, flash cards, fly swatter games, iPad challenges and many, many more. Check out the images below to see a taste of what we got up to!

Elsewhere in the curriculum, children have been so enthused in our Geography learning this term. We began with an in-depth study of the countries of the world and Europe and now we are focusing on a case study of Italy which has included work on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the city of Pompeii. Children can't wait to see where the rest of the unit takes us and are rushing staff through the content in a bid to get to exploding volcanos sooner rather than later!

October 2024

Wow! The first half term has flown by and all of a sudden we find ourselves at our first half-term break. The children have settled beautifully into the year group and it was a pleasure for all three of us to meet so many parents at our recent parents' evening to share how well everyone is getting on.

In maths, we have focused largely on number and we've already started working hard on fluency within times tables ahead of our MTC in June. Times Table Rockstars has taken a bit of a battering from our Y4s! We've also begun working on our understanding of shape, specifically looking at properties of 2d shape and reflection. In English, we've been loving reading How To Train You Dragon and being inspired to write to entertain and inform through poetry, descriptions and non-chronological reports. When we return after half-term, we'll be writing our own report based on a fictional dragon and, if their plans are anything to go by, the finished products will be brilliant!

Year 4s always love our current science unit based on Teeth and the Digestive System. Staring into mirrors, counting our teeth and identifying the types we have and making interactive models to represent them has been enormous fun and made our learning real. We've recently started our learning about the Digestive System and soon we'll be creating a real-life model... watch this space!!

Elsewhere in the curriculum, 4S have been busy starting their learning with violins while 4W has been exploring Stravinsky's Firebird Finale in their music lessons. Mrs Widdett has been especially impressed by her class' creativity when composing and improvising around the tune we've learnt.

Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't share the outcomes of our Autumn art unit. Children's drawings in sketchbooks just got better and better and the final piece - our clay dragon eyes - were showstoppers!

Aside from formal academic learning, we've also been floored by the children's growing maturity, kindness and values in action. It's been a great half term... bring on Autumn 2!

Welcome back!
September 2024

Welcome back to a new academic year at Leasowes. We are so excited to welcome back the brand new crop of Year 4s. The Autumn term is a busy one around school, so we encourage all parents to spend some time looking at the Parent News tab, specifically the School Calendar where all important dates for the year (that have already been organised!) have been added. An early date for your diary is our Meet the Teacher night on Wednesday 11th September where you can meet your child's new teacher(s) and learn about what to expect in Year 4. If you can't make it, the slides/information will be added to the bottom of this page following the meeting.

We start off the year group with a brilliant focus in History on the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. This is further strengthened with our reading of Cressida Cowell's 'How to Train Your Dragon' - the teachers' firm favourite of the year! We will be learning about how Britain changed after the fall of the Romans and how these settlers/invaders (you decide!) changed this country throughout this time in history.

Across the curriculum, we will be looking at the importance of Harvest in RE ahead of our Harvest Festival celebrations in October. In PSHE, we will be considering our feelings and those of others in our unit entitled 'Being Me in My World'. Our artwork will initially focus on the work of MC Escher and culminate in brilliant clay dragon eyes.

In Maths, we always start the year by ensuring children have a solid grounding in the basics of place value, use of the four operations and the number system. As you will no doubt be aware, in Y4 children undertake the Multiplication Tables Check in June and we are already supporting children to do their best, beat their scores and reap the rewards of being fluent in their tables across the maths curriculum. We thank you for your ongoing support in this.

Homework continues to be set on a Wednesday and due on a Monday. Please check your children's diaries regularly, signing weekly, and watch out for any further communication.