Year 4

Welcome to Year 4

		Our Team
Mrs Penn with Mrs May			Mr Fischer with Mrs Sowerby
Contact: e.penn@chickerell.dorset.sch.uk			Contact: j.fischer@chickerell.dorset.sch.uk

This half term in Year 4 (Summer 2)

Key learning skills: Resilience, Respect, Confidence, Independence, Enthusiasm & Cooperation

Our key learning skills focus for this half term is confidence. In class we will be giving the children lots of opportunities to demonstrate confidence and to also identify confidence in others. If your child demonstrates or recognises these skills in others outside of school, we would love to hear about it!

English and Reading

For the next 3 weeks will be looking at a folktale from Saudi Arabia - The Prince and the Honest Girl. The children will learn to storyboard, create a folktale mountain and build character profiles. We will also use drama to internalise the folktale before writing our own modern day version.

Maths

Continuing our journey of the White Rose Curriculum, our students will be learning to compare and order decimals. 

Geography

In our new project, 'Ancient Civilisations', the children will be learning about the history of three of the world’s first ancient civilisations: ancient Sumer, ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley civilisation. Children will learn about the rise, life, achievements and eventual end of each civilisation.

Science

This unit teaches the children about electrical appliances and safety. The children will construct simple series circuits and name their parts and functions, including switches, wires and cells. They will investigate electrical conductors and insulators and identify common features of conductors. The children will also learn about programmable devices and combine their learning to design and make a nightlight.

Music

This half term we will be following the Charanga scheme.

RE

In RE the children will be learning about the festival of Janmashtami, which celebrates the birthday of Lord Krishna and falls in August or September. Krishna is one of the Hindu faith's most popular gods.

The festival lasts for two days. Worshippers may sing songs, tell stories of Krishna's life, dance, rock his cradle and wait for midnight to arrive to mark his birth. Some Hindus fast during the day of Janmashtami and only eat after midnight.

Design & Technology

During our 'Tomb Builders' project, children will be learning  about simple machines, including wheels, axles, inclined planes, pulleys and levers, exploring how they helped ancient builders to lift and move heavy loads.

Art & Design

Our second new project, 'Statues, Statuettes and Figurines', teaches the children about 3-D representation of the human form, including statues, statuettes and figurines. They will study examples from ancient civilisations, and use their clay skills to create a Sumer-style figurine.

PE 

PE this year will be taught on a Tuesday. Please ensure that your child wears their full PE kit to school on this day. In addition to weekly PE lessons, we will also be participating in the Daily Mile as often as we can. 

Our Curriculum

As of October 2021, we have begun to use 'Cornerstones' curriculum throughout the school so that we can ensure a solid progressions of skills and knowledge acquisition in the foundation subjects,and Science and English particularly.

What is the Cornerstones Curriculum? 

The Cornerstones Curriculum is a creative and thematic approach to learning that is mapped to the 2014 primary national curriculum to ensure comprehensive coverage of national expectations. It is based on a child-centred pedagogy called The Four Cornerstones and is delivered through Imaginative Learning Projects (ILPs) and Knowledge Rich Projects (KRPs), which provide a rich menu of exciting and motivating learning activities that make creative links between all aspects of children’s learning. We believe children learn better when they are encouraged to use their imagination and apply their learning to engaging contexts. Our curriculum provides many learning challenges throughout the academic year that require children to solve problems, apply themselves creatively and express their knowledge and understanding effectively. Cornerstones also provide a rigorous skills and knowledge framework that outlines the end of year expectations in all subjects. These skills and knowledge are tied to activities and are age-related .

Contacting the Year 4 Team

Although we may not be able to meet face to face currently, we are more than happy to receive emails on the above links. Please bear in mind that we may not be able to respond until the following day.

At times, you may prefer to arrange to speak to us over the phone.  You can do this via email, again using the addresses above, or by calling the school office on 01305 783876 and leaving a message.

The School Day

To ensure safety of families, pupils and staff, the school drop off and pick up times have altered from the previous year. Children can still arrive between 8:30 and 8:50am.  Leaving times have changed slightly so that students with surnames beginning with A - M will leave school at 2:55pm. The remaining students will leave at 3:05pm.  Each student will have their hands sanitised at least 6 times a day, and always upon entering and leaving the school.

Spellings

Traditionally, spellings have been tested weekly, using Statutory Word lists, prefixes and suffixes learned in class. However, we have noticed that the pandemic has negatively impacted our students’ retention and produced gaps in their learning. 

Although Spelling Shed is an important part of helping our learners to improve their vocabulary, it is not necessarily useful to all our learners. Some students may like to continue to rise to the challenge by using the app, but others may need a differentiated approach. 

As reflective practitioners, in Year 4, we have identified that many of our students would benefit more directly by revisiting our Phonics programme, Read Write Inc.  Once secure in the individual sounds for each set, your child will then move on to the trickier Statutory Word lists. 

We have already started identifying the gaps and are now able to deliver a more personalised programme to improve your child’s progress. This means that, rightly, each student will be at different stages in their spellings, reading and handwriting.  Each half term, we will be able to re-assess your child, and adjust our support accordingly. 

The individual sounds will be from Sets 2 and 3. Students will not be expected to progress to Set 3 until the sounds of Set 2 are embedded securely.  After Set 3, we will reintroduce prefixes, suffixes and Year 3 & 4 Statutory word lists, following the Read, Write, Inc programme. 

There are 12 Set 2 ‘speed sounds’ that are made up of two or three letters which represent just one sound, e.g., ay as in play, ee as in tree and igh as in high. When learning their Set 3 speed sounds, they will be taught that there are more ways in which the same sounds are written, e.g., ee as in tree and ea as in tea. The speed sounds will be delivered in order of the frequency with which students will come across them when reading. 

Reading

We encourage all students to read widely with a grown-up at home, discussing the content of books they read so your child becomes fluent in vocabulary, grammar, inference and comprehension skills, maximising their experience and enjoyment of reading.

Children can now bring in book bags every day, along with their reading record. New books will be issued Monday so students can read with their adults at home and at school over the week. To enhance the experience, Year 4 children are also encouraged to use Oxford Reading Buddy regularly at home, as they do in school.

Oxford Reading Buddy moves students automatically through Oxford Levels. Once a student has met specified thresholds, based on the number of quiz scores above 80%, they are ready to move up to the next Oxford Level. Threshold numbers vary between levels, and numbers reduce at higher levels because the texts are longer and take more time to read.

The conditions for movement through Oxford Levels have been based on expected rates of progress and achievement. In the event that a student runs out of books at a given Oxford Level without having met the thresholds necessary to move up to the next Oxford Level, previously-read books will appear at the start of their eBook library ready for re-reading, and quizzes will be reset for a second attempt.

We are coaching students regularly on how to improve their book Quiz results in the classroom.  As there is no time limit and no sense of competition in the quizzes, we are focussing on taking the time to read the questions and search the text before committing to the answer, just as students will need to in a Reading Comprehension Test. Consistently scoring 80% or more will maximise their progression to the next level, where many more e-books will be available.  

Mathematics

Year 4 students are expected to know their times tables up to 12 x 12 by June 2022, when they will take part in the Multiplication Tables Check. This is a series of 25 questions with 6 seconds to answer and with a 3 second gap between questions. It is hard, requires maximum concentration and the multiplcation facts really do need to be known ‘off by heart’ in order to pass. To this end, we encourage all students to practise these at home and school, as well as participate in TT Rockstars.

There are links below to some sites that may support additional learning at home.

Uniform

Children should wear full school uniform to and from school with black outdoor school shoes, which should be suitable for field play and wet weather. A warm, waterproof or water-resistant coat should be provided in wet and cold weather. When the playing field is muddy, students are encouraged to wear their PE shoes in the classroom when returning from outside breaks.

From 13th Sept, as we are unable to use other classrooms to change in for PE, Year 4 students can come to school in their proper PE kit, with tracksuit bottoms and school jumper when necessary.

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