Welcome to Year 4.
Our Teachers are Mrs Humbles and Mr Hartington and our Teaching Assistants are Mrs Sedef and Miss Felgueiras.
Dec 132024
Lights, Goblins… ACTION!
This week started off with a DT extravaganza. We were knee deep in cardboard, cellophane, double sided sticky tape and electrical components but the children worked really hard and all of them managed to make a working light. We had lots of different designs including flowers, footballs and shells as well as lights for different purposes such as camping and reading. Well done, Year 4!
We have also been busy writing a character description for our foul goblins. We have been careful to use noun phrases, expanded noun phrases and a variety of adverbs to bring our characters to life.
In RE, we have been carrying out our own research about how Christmas is celebrated in other parts of the world. We are working in twos to research and present the information about special food and customs on an A3 poster. Next week we shall present our facts and knowledge to the rest of the class so we can see just how different other people’s cultures and traditions are but also how similar some of them may be too.
We hope you all have a wonderful weekend,
Year 4 team
-
Dec 062024
Gruesome Goblins!
This week we have been working on creating a character description for a goblin, who we met through the poem ‘Overheard on a Saltmarsh’ by Harold Monro. He is a particularly gruesome, putrid character with fetid breath and blood-shot eyes! These are some of the words we have been using to describe this vile creature. Let’s hope we don’t happen to meet him in the future!
We have been building problems using manipulatives this week in maths and then representing these in diagrams or bar models in order to help us understand different parts of the problem. It helps if we can recognise whether the start of the problem, change in the problem or the result is missing from the information, which helps us to know how to solve it.
In science we have been using circuit symbols to draw circuit diagrams and then asking our classmates to build the circuits to see if they would work. We had to work out where the problems were and how they could be fixed to make a complete circuit.
In music over the next couple of weeks the children have been invited to showcase their musical instrument prowess at the end of term class concerts. They have already signed up to slots for the next two lessons and so any rehearsing they can do at home will certainly be beneficial.We can’t wait to see them play!
Have a great weekend,
Year 4 team
Nov 292024
Winners!
This week Saffron had some very exciting news! All the children in years 4, 5 and 6 recently took part in a competition to redesign Victoria Street. Out of all the children in St Albans who took part, a group of children in Saffron class were awarded first place by the Mayor. Congratulations to Sophia, Jessica, Henry, Tommy, George, Alfie, and Sunny who have won a £100 voucher for our school.
Year 4 have now completed their stories based on the book Journey and hopefully you had the chance to read some of your children’s work during Parents’ Evening. We have been impressed by their use of adjectives, improvement in sentence starts and use of correct speech punctuation. Well done Year 4!
In maths this week we have been building and drawing problems with counters to visualise the problem in order to write the equation needed to work it out. We are moving on to problems involving bar models and comparison between two different numbers.
We tested materials in Science to see if they were conductors or insulators. We realised that all of our conductors were made of metal items and our insulators were not.
We are looking forward to making our DT projects next week, which is to make a lantern for a particular purpose. We have drawn some very creative designs and hopefully you will have received an email about some items we are in need of. We are looking for plastic bottles, cereal boxes, Pringles tubes and shoe boxes. If you have any of these items, please could you donate them to us from Monday onwards. We are due to make these on Thursday next week. Thank you.
Hope to see you at the Christmas Fair tomorrow,
Have a great weekend
Year 4 team.
-
Nov 222024
Electrical Engineers
This week we have been experimenting with electrical circuits. We have used different electrical components to build and test different combinations to see if they made complete circuits. We have also been considering useful features of lanterns and lights and using this information to design our own small light. We had to consider who the light would be for, what it may look like and think of 3 useful features for the design. We have had some very creative ideas, even for how the light may look once lit and if we could make patterns by cleverly using a mixture of translucent or transparent features. Watch this space!
In maths we have been continuing to practise our times tables and considering whether we could apply any rules to other numbers to find other multiples. We have also been looking at factors and finding all the factors of numbers in a methodical way.
In English, we have practised our skills in writing speech and incorporating it within a sentence. We have also been building a paragraph using all the language features we have been practising such as adjectives, conjunctions and fronted adverbials. Finally, we have begun to plan our own ‘Journey’ story.
In music this week we composed our own rhythms to fit with another song from Encanto and managed to play all three rhythms at once on the Djembe drums. We had to work hard at keeping the timing and tempo accurately so we all started and stopped at exactly the same time.
We hope you enjoy the weekend,
Year 4 Team
Nov 152024
Planners of the future
This week we became town/city planners with some visitors from Hertfordshire County Council asking us to help think of ideas in order to regenerate Victoria Street in St Albans. The problem is that Victoria Street is not currently a very attractive street in St Albans and does not give the best impression of the city when people arrive by train. The Council were seeking ideas to help improve this from providing more green spaces, safer cycle and pedestrian routes, as well as making other areas more attractive or informative with art work. Have a look at some of the planning work we did.
In English we have been developing our skills in readiness to write adventure stories, particularly looking at opportunities for speech and improving our word choices for description. In maths we have been working on multiples and practising times tables.
In Science we have considered electrical safety, in anticipation for our work with circuits next week. We created lists of do’s/don’ts and created safety posters in order to remind ourselves and others what can happen when working with electricity.
Our DT work this week has seen us investigate the best materials to use with our lanterns/torches. We considered the effect materials can have on the quality of light and considered different ways to design a switch.
Our new spelling programme is proving to be very successful. It is based on building words using prefixes, root words and suffixes. We intertwine the phonological spelling rules as we go along and in our spelling lessons each week we are constantly talking about them. Hopefully, we will see great results in our written work.
Have a great weekend,
Year 4 team
-
Nov 082024
We’re going on a Journey
Welcome back!
We hope you had a very enjoyable half term.
We started this week looking at our new book Journey by Aaron Becker. This is an illustrated story following a girl on a journey with her magic pen. We have been retelling the story using story maps and analysing our model text finding useful features for when we come to write our own adventure story.
We have also started a new topic in science – electricity. We have thought about what things use electricity and whether it is main or battery powered. We also thought about what the electricity allows the object to do – make sound, movement, heat or light or a combination of these things.
Our science is going to link nicely with our brand new DT project – which is to design a lantern. We started off this week thinking about the history of light from the first fire to OLED technology.
In music this week we used the track ‘We don’t talk about Bruno’ from Encanto as an accompaniment to our Djembe drumming. We practiced playing 3 different rhythms and attempted to put them all together for the first time!
In Spanish we are moving on to learning the days of the week and months of the year in order to talk about different dates.
Our new FeelIT emotion this fortnight is the feeling of being satisfied. We talked about when we have accomplished something, how it feels so satisfying, for example finishing a jigsaw, tidying our bedroom or completing a tricky piece of work. I wonder what will help us feel satisfied next week?
Have a great weekend.
Year 4 team
-
Oct 252024
Ancient Egyptian Day
The highlight of this week was our Ancient Egyptian Day on Monday. We were visited by Ani an Ancient Egyptian scribe who showed us how to mummify a body in order to prepare it and it’s soul for the journey to the afterlife. We also wrote a message in hieroglyphs, using ink and bamboo pens on papyrus. Everyone really carefully scribed their messages. We also examined some real replica’s of ancient Egyptian artefacts, answering questions about each one, virtually built an ancient Egyptian city, scoring points for each world event we managed to navigate through, if we had prayed to the right Gods and finally, we played the ancient Egyptian games of Senet and Mancala. We all had an amazing time and have lots of pictures to show you.
This week, we finished our charcoal illustrated stories of Howard Carter’ discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. We have really tried hard to use the charcoal to create drama in the story using shading.
We hope you all have a very enjoyable half term.
Year 4 team
-
Oct 182024
Wonderful Things!
Year 4 have now finished their suspense stories about the magnificent discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, describing the footsteps taken by Howard Carter in 1922. They have been using various techniques to build suspense including short sentences, show not tell and have ended on a cliffhanger. They have worked really hard with their stories, adding strong adjectives too to make the story more engaging. Year 4 would be pleased to show you next time you are in the classroom for soft start. Well done Year 4!
We have also been working hard on using the column method for addition this week and using it to answer problems where the addition might not always be obvious.
A highlight this week was in science where we tried to investigate which chocolate would melt the slowest and so would be better to use in a picnic on a hot day. We set up the experiment by making small foil boats to float the chocolate on whilst it melted over warm water. We discovered that in most cases the dark chocolate would be best as it was the slowest to melt. We also learnt some valuable lessons about how to conduct a fair test and what happens if our foil boats had a hole in them!
We are making progress with our charcoal stories in art and will be aiming to complete them next week.
Our new Feelit emotion this week was ‘ashamed’, we discussed what may cause people to feel like it, and how we can help someone feeling it.
We hope you have a great weekend,
Year 4 team
-
Oct 042024
Show Not Tell
This week we have been practising some techniques to add to our suspense stories. We particularly like ‘show not tell’ which is when we don’t tell the reader exactly what emotion a character may be feeling but show them through their actions. For example:
‘When he finally saw the tomb, his eyes lit up and a smile appeared on his face from ear to ear.’
Hearing a noise, his heart pounded and he nearly jumped out of his skin.’
‘When he saw what was inside the tomb, the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.’
Our art this week has been linked to our history and English work on the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. We have looked at how artists tell stories through pictures and have started to plan our own picture story of the discovery of the tomb. In history, we looked at historical evidence from the discovery, including pictures of the artefacts found within the tomb, that had laid undiscovered for over 3000 years. We also noted what Howard Carter said on his discovery of these artefacts by saying he had found ‘Wonderful things’.
In maths, we have continued to work on mental strategies to add or subtract. We have used our skills of rounding numbers to estimate.
In PE, we have been working on basketball and netball techniques, including different styles of throwing as well as dodging and marking.
In music we were listening and appreciating the music of Lin-Manuel Miranda who wrote music for films such as Moana, Encanto and Hamilton.
Our FEELIT emotion for this week is ‘motivated’. We talked about what it feels like to be motivated.
We hope you enjoy the weekend.
Year 4 Team
-
Sep 272024
Help! There’s a whale in my teacup!
Bonjour! Ola! Ciao! Privet! Namaste! Hello!
Year 4 thoroughly enjoyed our Languages Day yesterday and all looked so colourful in the colours of so many different flags. We had a great time choosing landmarks from around the world of places we have visited or our families have originated. We then created silhouettes of each landmark and sponged paint around the edge. We used the colours of the flag of the country the landmark is in. We then learnt the word for hello in the language and added it to our pictures. I’m sure you will agree, they have been really effective!
We have also shown our creativity in art by experimenting with charcoal to create light and dark tones, backgrounds and different shapes. We read a poem called ‘My Menagerie’ which inspired us to create our own compositions to tell a story. We then used charcoal or pencil to create a mini comic scene. We had hippos eating a rubber, a whale in a teacup, a wolf answered the phone and a bear in the fridge. have a look at some of our pieces!
We have started preparations for writing suspense stories and looked at some techniques for how authors add suspense in stories. We will be practising some of these techniques next week .
In maths we are beginning a unit on practising calculating in our head. Hopefully, we will be able to use methods which mean we won’t automatically need to use the column method!
We hope you have an enjoyable weekend.
Year 4 team
-
