The last half term has gone so quickly. Year 4 have worked so hard and had many fantastic learning experiences and opportunities this half term.

Year 4 have continued to use  the book, Food around the world by Moira Butterfield and Izzi Howell as a starting point for our learning. We have written  a newspaper article about a World Food Festival which would benefit global world hunger charities.We  have been used alliteration to make interesting headline and using reported and direct speech to record the thoughts of key characters in the event.  We have then turned to poetry and written humorous  limericks.  We had to make sure our poems fit the limerick patterns of an AABBA structure, lines 1,2 and 5 rhyming, a food theme and used similes to add description. They were certainly very funny. We put them on a slide deck and added a recording of ourselves reading the poem on Mote.

In Reading, we have finished reading The Great Chocoplot by Chris Callaghan. We have greatly enjoyed this book with its interesting characters and the sometimes funny and sometimes scary situations they got into. We have used our skills to   summarise parts of the book and then compare parts of the book and compare the book with other stories we have read.  We have also practised these skills using a poem called the Cliff Guardian. From its vivid description we were able to establish that the Cliff Guardian was a light house. 

In Maths, we have continued our unit on decimals  We have been rounding decimals to the nearest one, comparing and ordering decimals and writing fractions such as  1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 as decimals. We also completed maths activities as part of the NSPCC Number Day. We have now moved onto applying our knowledge of decimals to help us write money as pounds using the £1.00 format. We have then compared and ordered amounts of money and practised rounding them to the nearest pound or ten pounds. 

In Science, we have concluded  our topic, States of Matter and have explored the water cycle. We created our own mini water cycle within a glass jar part filled with very hot water inside the jar and ice on the lid of the jar to help the water condense. We observed the water become water vapour then condense when it was cooled by the lid. The condensed water formed droplets and fell back into the water inside the jar.  

We have finished our Geography topic, Where does our food come from? by exploring where the ingredients from our school dinners come from. We gathered the data and concluded that a range of local and imported food was used. We then debated the advantages and disadvantages of buying our food locally and importing our food and decided that eating a range of food from both local and imported sources gave us and the planet maximum benefits.

In Art , we have created our still life collage by constructing our background, foreground and elements of still life. Once constructed, we used water colours to add details to our work and added shade and shadows. As you can see in the photos below the end results were amazing. 

We also celebrated our own talents, achievements and uniqueness as part of Mental Well being Week.

PE days are Monday and Friday for Topaz and Monday and Tuesday for Amethyst.

Have a good half term break and we look forward to welcoming you back to school on Monday 24th February.

A reminder of weekly homework:

• Reading each day

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

• 15 minutes on TTRS (Soundcheck)

• Century (set on Thursdays)