Welcome back. Year 4 have already experienced so many amazing events and there are more to come!

Year 4 begun a new book to inspire our writing. We are using the story of Beowulf, which was a story told around the fire during the Anglo-Saxon era and first written down in the 800 AD. Our retelling is by Rob Lloyd Jones. There are many amazing characters in the book and we have used the character of the Grendal to write a character description. We have practised using similes and metaphors and developed expanded noun phrases to add detail to our descriptions. 

In Reading, we have begun the book, The Anglo-Saxon Times by Andrew Langley. This is set out in the style of a newspaper and features many of the common events of this period and details on how people lived. We have been using the text to develop our retrieval skills and discuss why the author used certain words in the text. 

In Maths, we have begun a new unit focusing on length, mass and volume. We have compared and converted units such as millilitres to litres, grams to kilograms and centimetres to metres, metres to kilometres and the inverse. We have also thought about which units are best suited to certain situations e.g. if I was measuring a pen, I would use cm and not metres. 

In Science, we have begun our topic sound and vibration. We have identified sounds and explored how we can see the vibrations that cause sound by exploring rice on a drum skin, water in a container that is then hit, feeling our vocal chords when we sing, pinging a ruler and an elastic band. We have also researched why sound travels more quickly and further underwater and how animals such as dolphins and whales use this to help them move around the deep, dark ocean. We discovered this was called echolocation.

We have started a new History topic called How hard was it to invade and settle Britain? which focuses on the Anglo-Saxon invasion and subsequent migration from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. This era started when the Romans left Britain in 410 AD and continued until the arrival of the Normans in 1066. We have explored the push and pull factors that encouraged the Anglo-Saxons to relocate and settle in Britain and what these settlements would have looked like. We have thought about common features of their houses, single room dwellings made from wattle and daub, with a central fire pit and often a workshop area.  We also dressed up for Anglo-Saxon day and looked amazing. We managed to make the best of the day and created Anglo-Saxon engraved brooches as well as researching life in Anglo-Saxon times and creating illuminated letters.

We have also had two workshops this week, one from Healthy Heroes and another from the Bumbles of Honeywood. In Healthy Heroes, Catherine showed us a series of activities we could do to make being active fun. She also showed us what an amazing effect being active has on our brains.

We have two more workshops coming up in the next couple of weeks. Our rescheduled Anglo-Saxon Workshop will be on Friday 14th March and we will be attending the Easter Experience on Monday 17th March. 

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 (set on Thursdays)