Year 4

Topic 4 sees us look at our last Geography topic of the year. Our focus question will be: 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 final Love for Reading text will move on to 'Gangsta Granny'. 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. The book will help us to write a long narrative and maybe even a newspaper report. A visit to London will bring the book to life! We are looking forward to these visits in June.

Part 4 of our year will also see the children been put to the test - a multiplication check! They have worked extremely hard all year and we know they will all do amazing.

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!

At the start of Spring 2, Year 4 will be starting another History topic based around Roman Britain and delving in to how and why the Romans invaded Britain back in 43AD. 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. The children will march and Chester just like the Romans did all of that time ago. As you can see from our displays, the children have made their own Roman shields (even understanding the different meanings of the symbols on the shields).

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 during the previous 10 week period 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. Not forgetting - continuing our hard work with times tables!!

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 10-week period coming up!!

Enriching Education Part 2 for Year 4 means History and 'Meeting the Mummy' where we will visit Liverpool World Museum 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. During our visit to the museum, the children will recreate an Egyptian ritual of the the afterlife and everything this entails. They will also find out how important the River Nile was to the locals of Egypt.

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. It will get a bit messy when the children recreate the movement of food through the digestive system.

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!! However, times table fluency will continue to be at the forefront of our learning to help the children prepare for later learning in Year 5 and 6. Of course, Oasis songs will be used to help this process.

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

Over the next 10 weeks, our focus will be based around 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. The children will be immersed in to a fantastic Virtual Reality experience where they will explore active volcanoes.

The children have already read JK Rowling's world-famous text 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' at the end of Year 3 and will use this to inform a lot of our writing sessions which will be based around character and location descriptions from the text.

In Maths, Times Tables fluency will have a huge focus and the children will work really hard to improve their ability. We will develop the children's knowledge of place value and embed their ability to use written calculation methods (addition, subtraction, division and multiplication).

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. The VR experience day will also incorporate exploring animals from all around the world. We will learn how to categor 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?