Welcome back! We hope that you have had a wonderful Christmas holiday!
Our new topic this term is 'The Blue Abyss'. During this topic, we will be learning all about the oceans and wide variety of animals and plants that live there. We will focus on food chains and food webs, how different animals and plants rely on each other to survive, coral reefs and our impact on the ocean environments. To get our new topic off to a great start, we will be having a 'WOW day' where we will be designing and making our own sea creatures and talking to a real marine biologist through skype. In English, we will be writing a setting description and narrative story based on a short video clip from the film 'Shark Tale'. We will also be creating some poetry about the oceans, inspired by our drama workshops, and writing a letter from deep sea explorers in a submarine back to the surface world. In maths, we will be continuing our work on division and starting a new topic on measurement. We will be continuing to practise our times tables daily up to 12 x 12 and encourage the children to do so at home as well by using Times Tables Rockstars and Doodlemaths. In our theme lessons this half term, we will be learning all about food chains and food webs, different sea creatures, layers of the ocean, coral reefs and how humans are affecting the oceans. For specific information on about what the children will learn please see the knowledge organiser attatchment below. For our computing lessons, we will be focusing on events, sequences and loops using corde.org to learn more about programming and algorithms. In our music lessons, we will be continuing to play the recorder, learning new notes to help us a wider range of familiar songs and nursery rhymes and composing music to Yellow Submarine by The Beetles.
Our whole school rules are:
1. Be ready
2. Be respectful
3. Be safe
PE
Our PE days this term are a MONDAY and FRIDAY. Normal PE lessons will be on a Monday so please make sure your child's PE kit is in school for these days. Swimming will start on the first Friday of this term (10th January). Please ensure that your child has a FULL swimming kit on these days including: a swimming costume/ trunks, a towel and a swimming hat. Children will not be allowed into the pool without a swimming hat. If you do not have one these can be purchased from the pool for £1 before the swimming session if you send it with the child.
Homework
Homework will be set for the children online via our teams each week on a Friday. The children have log ins in their reading records and we have gone through how they need to log in in class. Any questions please just ask.
In addition to this, we focus on weekly spellings, which we ask pupils to practise alongside doing their homework. Spellings will be tested and new spellings set on Fridays. Children will also be tested on their times tables daily and we ask that they learn these at home as much as possible!
Reading Books
Library books will be changed as often as possible in the classroom. Children can access Accelerated Reader tests which they will need to pass to choose a new book in the classroom daily. They can also access these at home using their Year 4 launchpad.
Dates for your Diary
19th February - Egypt class drama workshop performance
3rd March - Parents Evening
5th March- Parents Evening
19th March - Egypt Class Assembly