Year 4

During Topic 4, the children will be focusing their Geographical brains around answering the question 'Why are rivers important to us?' They will visit the closest river to them - The River Blithe - and will also venture further afield up to Milldale where they will measure different parts of a river and sketch different parts of a river. This will all come together to help them understand whether rivers are important to us.

Our Love for Reading text will move on to Gangsta Granny - written by the famous presenter and comedian David Walliams. We have read this text already during story time at the end of the day so the children will be ready to produce some fantastic pieces of writing inspired by this text. A visit to London will bring the book to life!

We will change to our final Science topic (electricity) where the children create electrical circuits through experiments and hands-on learning. The children will also try and fix faults they find in electrical circuits. This will definitely help us understand how important an electricians job role is!

The Year 4 children will also continue to do a lot of learning around times tables because the multiplication check is fast approaching.

A great finale to the year!

During this unit, Year 4 will be starting another History topic based around Roman Britain and they will be able to answer our main question. The children will visit the historically important place of Chester to take part in a Roman experience, as we branch out from Stoke-on-Trent to see the impact they had on other parts of Britain. As you can see the children have already made Roman shields in preparation for this topic and they are proudly displayed on our boards.

Our new Love for Reading book will be the excellent Matilda by Roald Dahl. The children have already read this text at the end of each day for the past half term and are now eager to do some writing based around this text. In Maths, we will be delving deeper in to fractions and embedding our use of number even further.

Our Science focus will move on to all things SOUNDS. We will be taking part in many more exciting, hands-on experiments and experiences to test how far sound can travel, what sort of sounds we can hear and what pitch is. Another exciting half term coming up!!

In this unit, Year 4 will be turning our attention to History. We will be visiting Liverpool World Museum to 'Meet the Mummy' and find out all about Ancient Egypt. Our attention is on the early civilisations, including Ancient Egypt (where we will study them in-depth!), the Indus Valley civilisation and the Mayan civilisation. We will be using lots of historical enquiry skills such as comparing and using sources.

In Science, we will be moving on to our Teeth and Eating unit, looking at how animals have different teeth and comparing them to our own. We will also be looking in-depth at the digestive system - this will involve lots of different ways of showing it, from using equipment to recreate it to creating a stop motion video to showcase our learning.

In English, we will move on to writing about the amazing 'Place Called Perfect' - we've loved reading it so far in story time!! Lots of our writing is going to be based around the amazing characters and their wonderful adventure. In Maths, we will continue to work hard to embed our number knowledge, as we look to smash multiplication and division!!

Plus much, much more! Christmas performance is coming...

In this unit, our focus is on earthquakes and volcanoes. We will be looking at tectonic plates and how they affect the world, how close we are to a volcano in Stoke and the advantages and disadvantages of living near a volcano. Also, we will look at how volcanoes are formed and why they erupt.

Our 'Love 4 Reading' text will be JK Rowling's world-famous text 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'. This will inform a lot of our writing sessions which will be based around character and location descriptions  from the text.

In Maths, we will develop the children's knowledge and place value and embed their ability to use written calculation methods (addition, subtraction, division and multiplication). Times tables will continue to be a huge focus in Year 4!

Our Science unit for this block has a focus on living things (Can a living thing survive anywhere?). We will be learning about the different types of creatures that inhabit our world and how we can tell one from another through their characteristics. We will learn how to categories the living things that we know. Here are some of the questions we will be answering:

What is a living thing and how do they differ?
What living things live in S-o-T and why do they live there?
What do classification keys tell us?