Year 4 have been very busy fortnight full of learning and fun.

Year 4 have continued to use the lush world of "The Great Kapok Tree" to develop their work this week. We've  completed our description of the rainforest setting using all five of our senses to describe the lush environment. This week, we have begun our latest learning journey, to write a persuasive letter asking the President of Brazil to help save the rainforest. We have practised debating the ideas for our argument, identifying features of a persuasive letter and have practised creating relative clauses and using modal verbs to make our work more persuasive. We will be finishing creating our letters next week. 

In Reading, we have practised using our summarising and inference  skills to explore extracts from a range of texts, pictures and video clips. These included, two contrasting poems about fishing, and the wrong pong.

During the past two weeks, in Maths, we have been learning about addition and subtraction. We have begun with adding 4 digit numbers that don't need to be renamed (carried over). Then, developed renaming in each of the columns. We focused on seeing how we can't have numbers over 9 in each column so we need to rename them and place them in the next column. We have also emphasised the place value of each of the digits as they add or subtract. We have explored several methods but focused on the column method to help us. 

In Science, we have continued our topic of Digestion and Food. We have explored what type of tooth brush is the best for cleaning our teeth, a hard one, a medium one or a soft one? We used laminated sheets with the same picture of teeth on them. We then coloured the teeth with pen and then used one of the brushes and toothpaste to clean the teeth. We timed how long it took each time. We tried each brush three times to get a more accurate result. We have also been exploring how an animal's teeth indicate what type of food it eats (herbivore, carnivore and omnivore).

We have continued with our topic, Why are Rainforests so important? We have explored the dangers to the rainforest and identified lines of longitude and latitude.

We have celebrated two special days this fortnight , European Languages Day on Thursday 26th September and National Poetry Day on Thursday 3rd October. For European Languages day,  we explored Bulgarian and some of our little experts helped us to pronounce some classroom words in Bulgarian. We then used these words to label a picture of a classroom.     For National Poetry Day, we explored the poem One by James Berry. We thought about the meaning of the poem and worked in groups to recite parts of it.

PE days are Monday and Friday. We will be swimming on Wednesdays - Please wear a school PE kit on these days and  if possible remove earrings.

A reminder of weekly homework:

• Reading each day

• Spellings -given out on Friday and tested the following Friday

• 15 minutes on TTRS (Soundcheck)

• Century