Welcome to Year 4
Life in Year 4
Year 4 is all about applying the independence that children have learned during their first year with us. We continue to encourage children to take a real pride in their learning, as well as celebrating individuality. In year 4, children build on their ability to become self-reflective learners; encouraged to develop and improve their own work through using independent strategies and with less reliance on adults for guidance. We spend time working with the children to teach them the importance of resilience in all aspects of life and as the year progresses they begin to take more responsibility for their actions and choices, whilst learning to accept differences of opinions.
Learning continues to be exciting and awe-inspiring, with D&T projects such as creating their own light boxes. Year 4 is also the year that all children take part in swimming lessons.
Staff
Mr Oakey - Class Teacher
Miss Lawrie - Class Teacher
Learning in Year 4
English
Reading
In year 4 we continue to encourage active reading strategies where the children think critically about what they have read. They will continue to explore a wide range of texts and text types including poetry, fiction and non-fiction through daily reading lessons. Building on previous knowledge, teaching is directed more towards developing a wider vocabulary and a deeper understanding and enjoyment of stories, poetry, plays and non-fiction. The children are encouraged to read for pleasure to develop a wider breadth and depth of reading and each term, their reading skills are applied to an engaging book study in both fiction and non-fiction genres.
Writing
In year 4 children begin to develop as writers through a carefully planned teaching sequence. They are taught to enhance the effectiveness of what they write as well as increase their competence as writers. Children build on what they have learnt in year 3, particularly in terms of more varied grammar, vocabulary and narrative structures from which they can draw to express their ideas. Children begin to understand how writing can be different from speech. Joined handwriting should be the norm and children should be able to use it fast enough to keep pace with what they want to say.
Maths
A key focus in maths this year is times tables. As we move towards the national times tables check at the end of the year, we aim to be able to recall quickly times tables facts up to 12 x 12. Having these facts at our fingertips will help us greatly when we move on to work with other ideas, such as fractions, later in the year. In year 4 we will begin to explore a range of ideas in more complicated ways, meeting negative numbers for the first time, working with decimals up to 2 decimal places, and converting between units of measure, including time. To help with our times tables, we will be regularly using TT Rockstars in our lessons – you can log on at home too! We will also continue to set homework tasks to encourage you to think mathematically in order to solve problems.
Year 4 Curriculum Overview
Year 4 is full of exciting topics that cover the full breadth of the National Curriculum.
Please see the documents below for this half terms Curriculum Newsletters and Knowledge Organisers