We’ve really enjoyed a relaxing start to our World Book Day! We chose a book from our Book Club collection or from our KS2 Honesty Library and read it wherever we wanted with whoever we wanted.
Reading in a ‘desk den’ was a popular choice …
… as was our favourite seat …
… and the brightly lit reflection area.
Did you know that every week, Year 4 have the chance to get their ROCKSTAR selfie on our TTRS Wall of Fame? They also have the chance to feature on our TTRS Wheel of Fame in Achieve and Believe assembly. The lucky winner of the Wheel of Fame challenges a teacher for the ultimate honour of winning the TTRS trophy!
What does my child need to do?
Play 15 minutes of TTRS games in the week leading up to the Friday (when we check how much each child has played.) We recommend little and often. 3 minutes per day every school day might be easier to achieve than doing it all in one go.
Why does it matter?
If children know their times tables they will find the rest of the maths we learn in school much easier. This is true from Year 3 but is particularly important in Year 4 where we learn column multiplication and learn more about fractions.
Questions?
If you have any questions or need any help do let me know. Send me an email / call the school office / speak to me at pick-up. If you don’t like your child to use electronic devices at home let me know and I can provide alternative ways for them to practise their times tables.
I can’t wait to see even more of our superstars on the Wall of Fame and challenging (and answering faster than) teachers in Achieve and Believe!
Year 4 have done a great job learning their number facts over the holidays! Children are bringing home the tests they did today to show you how well they’ve done. When you have collected your sponsorship money please bring it in to school and we will let you know how much we have raised as a school!
We’re really proud of how Year 4 represented St James’ on their trip to Wetherby High School this afternoon.
The children took part in a circuit of sporting challenges using skills they have learned in their PE lessons as well as learning new skills.
The day finished with a variety of relay races. The teamwork was incredible and was matched by heart-warming team spirit displayed by children cheering on their teammates.
Year 4, you are amazing sports people! We are super proud of you!
We’re all really proud of how Year 4 enjoyed exploring the exhibits and learning about rocks and volcanoes at MAGNA this week. The children enjoyed exploring all the different pavillions but the water pavillion was their particular favourite.
If your child doesn’t know all of the times tables facts we have learnt in school so far, they’ve been given 2 facts to learn this week. It’d be great if you could ask your child what their facts are and quiz them on them over the week.
We will continue to do this for the rest of the year so any extra practise you can do at home would be great!
We’ve really enjoyed writing our diary entries this week! We’ve been bringing our learning about volcanoes from Geography into our writing by writing a diary entry about the day a volcano erupted. We’ve been using expanded noun phrases to provide a detailed description and conjunctions to join clauses.
Elara was really proud of her writing, particularly when she reviewed it against the R2s (things we need to do to be successful.)
Elara’s writing skills continued to amaze me when the next day she wrote another diary entry. We will be editing and self-assessing these next week but you can already see how she has used more conjunctions and expanded noun phrases in the initial draft of the second diary entry. This time she also used her dictionary skills to correct her spelling mistakes.
Check back next week to see some more of our formidable writing!
As part of our learning about knowing how to seek help and keep ourselves safe, we joined the NSPCC for an online assembly about Speaking Out to Stay Safe. We loved discussing what we might worry about and how we could get help.
Shae’s reflection at the end of the session summed it up perfectly:
Children can have a sack full of worries and may need help.
It’s great that the children know it is normal to have worries and even more importantly that they have lots of ideas of how they can get help for those worries.
It was great to welcome you to our classroom this week to share some ideas of how you might practise times tables and reading at home. If you were unable to join us this time, please let me know if you would like to find out about the ideas we shared.
One of the ideas we looked at was what you can do when you come across an exciting or unfamiliar word when you are reading at home. In class we use a frayer model (pictured below) to gain a better understanding of a word. At home you could use one part of the model or discuss a couple of the parts.
For example, if you were reading part of our class novel, The Firework Maker’s Daughter by Philip Pullman, your child might not be confident with the meaning of the word “muttered”.
You could start by looking for clues in the text as to what it means by asking questions such as:
What other word could have been used in the sentence to make this make sense?
How do you think they might be talking? Would they be shouting? Whispering? Would they be excited? Nervous?
After your child has used the clues in the text, they could use a dictionary or an online search engine to research the meaning of the word.
You could talk about how the -ed suffix shows that it is in the past tense.
Finally, you could challenge your child to think of their own sentence using the word muttered. Alternatively, could they think of any synonyms (words with the same meaning) or antonyms (words with the opposite meaning)?
As part of our learning this week, we have thought about assessing risk and ensuring we, and others, are happy and healthy. As part of this we thought about personal boundaries. We thought about why personal boundaries are important to us and to others.
