Year 4 are charging into the last half term of the year and eager to learn.

Year 4 are using the book 'Arthur and the Golden Rope' by Joe Todd-Stanton  which explores the story of Arthur Brownstone, a Viking boy who lives in a small Icelandic village kept from freezing by the great fire. When Fenrir the wolf extinguishes the fire and the village blames Arthur, he must set off across the sea to the land of the gods to ask for help. After many adventures, Arthur saves his village with the help of the God Thor. We have explored the story and have begun to plan a newspaper article about the events in the story. We have practised using direct and reported speech and colons ready to use in our reports next week. 

In Reading, we have begun our new book  How to train your dragon by Cressida Cowell. It is the story of Hiccup, the son of the Stoick the Vast ( Chief of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe) on the Island of Berk. To become a full member of the tribe he and the other novices must steal and train a dragon.   We have focused on using our prediction skills to predict what will happen in the text and what the characters will do next. We have also retrieved words from the text to answer questions.

In Maths, we have been revising our multiplication skills and exploring the distributive law to help us multiply numbers larger than 10 by partitioning them to make two partial products which could then be used  to find the product. We have also revised telling the time as 12 and 24 hour clock times and converting between the two. We have also calculated the duration of time and converted between units of time to solve problems.

In Science, we have begun with our new topic in which we have have been exploring the viscosity of liquids. This week, we conducted an experiment to measure how quickly a range of liquids move down a chart when it is place vertically. We found that the higher the viscosity the more slowly the liquid moved.

.We have begun a new History topic, Were the Vikings raiders, traders or settlers? We have ordered events in a timeline to see where the Vikings fit into British history. We have explored who the Vikings were and why they came to Britain. We have also looked at bias in sources that have given us a very specific image of the Vikings.

We have had another workshop from the Bumbles of Honeywood who work with us to help develop the skills we need to be successful in the future. we practised developing our team working skills to solve the problem of how to cross a river with a limited amount of stepping stones. We negotiated what to do and explored various ideas that allowed us to pass safely.

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)