Welcome to our Year 4 class page

I hope you all had a lovely half term break, we have another exciting and busy term to look forward to.

What are we doing in the Autumn 2 term?

Our topic this term is geography based, with a lot of incidental history, we will be learning all about the North American continent, latitude and longitude as well as the hemispheres and equator. Our knowledge organiser is below for you to look at.  

Our class reading text this half term is Henry's Freedom Box by Ellen G. Levine.  It is based on the true underground railway story of a slave who posts himself to freedom. Henry Brown doesn’t know how old he is. Nobody keeps records of slaves’ birthdays. All the time he dreams about freedom, but that dream seems farther away than ever when he is torn from his family and put to work in a warehouse. Henry grows up and marries, but he is again devastated when his family is sold at the slave market. Then one day, as he lifts a crate at the warehouse, he knows exactly what he must do: He will mail himself to the North. After an arduous journey in the crate, Henry finally has a birthday — his first day of freedom. 

We will continue to develop our reading comprehension skills using VIPERS - I have placed details of this on our page, please scroll down to read more and use to help your child with their reading comprehension skills. In R.E. we will be thinking about incarnation as we move towards Christmas. In art we will look at the origins and designs of the underground railway used by the slaves in America and we will practice our sewing skills to create a quilt. In French we will develop our previous learning about time and look at telling the time in French. This half term we will have dance and basketball in PE.  In computing we will be looking at coding.

We have a very busy and exciting half term planned, should you at any time need to discuss anything please do contact me and we could meet after school, alternatively please leave a message on the class e-mail account or with the school office. 

Mrs Lowe

Our PE lessons will be on Tuesday and Friday and will focus on gymnastics indoors and football skills outdoors. Please ensure P.E. kits  are kept in school all half term, including outdoor trainers, as we may have other opportunities. 

Homework will be given on Friday and collected the following Friday.  We often mark together in class so the children can learn from what they have done.  Please do not stress over homework, if your child is struggling please come and talk to me.  Spellings are learned together on Monday, we practice together during the week and the children have the option to bring them home to practice too ready for a test on Friday.  I have sent a copy of the year 3/4 statutory list home.

 What are we doing in the Autumn 1 term?

Our topic this term is history based and we will be learning all about the Anglo Saxons and Vikings and their struggle for the crown of Britain.  Our knowledge organiser is below for you to look at.  We launched our topic with a whole day of Anglo Saxon and Viking activities including making a leather key ring, drawing our initials in runes using antler. 

Our class reading text this half term is Anglo-Saxon boy by Tony Bradman: Magnus is the son of Harold Godwinson, lord of the Southern Saxons and ruthlessly ambitious claimant to the throne of England. Overnight, Magnus finds himself cast centre-stage in the family feud that led to one of history's most famous battles - the Battle of Hastings in 1066. We will continue to develop our reading comprehension skills using VIPERS - I have placed details of this on our page, please scroll down to read more and use to help your child with their reading comprehension skills. In R.E. we will be thinking about creation and we will ask the question "What do we learn from the creation story?" In art we will look at the origins of Thor's hammer, design and create our own in clay.  This half term we have music and our first focus is learning a song as part of our class presentation at the harvest festival in church on Wednesday 25 September at 2.00.

We have a very busy and exciting half term planned, should you at any time need to discuss anything please do contact me and we could meet after school, alternatively please leave a message on the class e-mail account or with the school office. 

Mrs Lowe

What is Vipers?

VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum.  They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.

VIPERS stands for

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc.