Year and welcome back to Year 4. With gusto and enthusiasm, we have returned to school ready to learn and launched into our new books and topics.

Year 4 are using the book, Food around the world by Moira Butterfield and Izzi Howell as a starting point for our learning. We have explored the different types of food in the book and the types of food eaten every day and the food eaten on special occasions. We have then thought about the millions of people around the world who don't have enough to eat and the reasons for this. This research is going to help us write a persuasive letter next week to the president of the World Health Organisation to persuade him to do something about world hunger.

In Reading, we have begun reading The Great Chocoplot by Chris Callaghan. This book focuses on what happens when it is announced that a great prophecy predicts that all chocolate will disappear for ever in six days. Can Jelly and her family save the day and save chocolate? We have been retrieving answers to questions from the text and predicting what will happen next and why characters act in a certain way. We wonder what will happen next.

In Maths, we have started our unit on fractions. This is another unit where our times tables can really aid us so remember to keep practising them. We have explored writing hundredths, mixed numbers, equivalent fractions, simplifying fractions and adding fractions with the same denominator. We have used poly pad to help us to visualise the fractions  and the numbers we have been using. We can also split and rename groups of fractions to aid our exploration. 

In Science, we have begun our new topic, States of Matter and have explored the features that make solids, liquids and gases. We have explored if each state can be compressed, can you pour them and if they can change shape. From this we were able to make statements about each of the states.

We have begun our new Geography topic, Where does our food come from? We have revised the location of the tropics and equator. We then looked at how our food choices can affect the environment and what is meant by fair trading.

We have begun our new Art topic, Still Life. We have explored the work of Paul Cezanne and how he positioned objects to make you see them from a different angle and make you look very carefully at them.

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

A reminder of weekly homework:

• Reading each day

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

• 15 minutes on TTRS (Soundcheck)

• Century