September News - 2025

Dear Parents and Carers, 

First, I would like to welcome all Parents and Carers to Year 4. Slowly, I am getting more familiar recognising everyone which should mean giving out at the end of the day runs much smoother! Also, I wanted to say a huge thankyou to all parents that attended the Welcome to Year 4 meeting. I also wanted to remind parents that the Year 4 class page on the school website is kept updated with key information and documentation as the year moves on. I have had a lovely first three weeks with the class. They have all made a fantastic first impression and I am really excited about all the learning opportunities we have in front of us over the coming year. 

During the first week, we spent some time focussing on our new class hero Martin Luther King Jr. We learnt about his life and analysed his famous ‘I Have a Dream Speech’. The children then wrote about their own dreams for the future which we then turned into a class display.  

In Reading, we have started our class novel of The Witches by Roald Dahl. The children have completed different activities based on the book including creating freeze frames where they acted out some key scenes from the first chapters of the book. Examples of this can be seen below. In Writing, we first looked at performing poetry. We read several poems by Joseph Coelho and then performed these in an engaging way thinking about how to use our voice and actions. 

In Maths, we have started the year by completing a unit on Place Value. This has included finding numbers up to 10,000 on a numberline and partitioning four-digit numbers in different ways. 

In Science, we have started our Living Things unit of work focussing on how we can group animals and plants in different ways including different types of vertebrates. 

Finally, in History we have started our new unit on the invasion and settlement of Anglo-Saxons in Britain. We have looked at the reasons for the Anglo-Saxons leaving their homelands and we have looked at the type of settlements they built. 

October News - 2025

Dear Parents and Carers, 

It has been a lovely first half term with the class. I can’t believe how quickly these eight weeks have passed. We must be having fun! A huge thank you to all the parents that attended Parent Teacher Consultations, it was lovely to have the opportunity to discuss how well the children have settled into Year 4.  

In Reading, we have finished our class novel of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. The children have been working really hard to read the story with expression and prosody. We have some very talented young actors in the class that have enjoyed acting out scenes from the book. We have also worked hard on making accurate predictions and we completed a conscience alley to investigate a character’s thoughts and feelings before and after being turned into a mouse.

 In Writing, we have completed our first long write of the year. We wrote a persuasive leaflet to young witches’ trying to persuade them to come to The Grand High Witch Academy run by The Grand High Witch herself. The children wrote a first draft to include Rule of Three, rhetorical questions and conjunctive adverbials before self-editing and publishing their leaflet in their Published Writing books. We are now working on writing a fable suitable for children.

 In Maths, we have now completed our work on column methods. The children have worked really hard on this and they are becoming much more proficient in column addition, subtraction, multiplication and bus stop division when no remainders are required. We have also started our work on Fractions by finding some simple equivalent fractions and identifying proper and improper fractions.  

 In Art and Design, we had a very enjoyable Art Day this week. The children completed a drawing unit called Power Prints. To begin with the children learnt how to use different grades of pencil to make light, mid and dark tones using a shading technique. They then applied this skill to an observational drawing of a ribbon. Next, the children used charcoal to investigate proportion in art. The children created a background and then used a rubber to identify the light tones and used charcoal to add dark tones. The children then created collages thinking about how to create interesting compositions before they used crayons to create a wax layer covered in paint that they then scratched off to create a print version of their collage.