Year 4 Newsletter

Spring Term (1) 2016

Welcome back and a Happy New Year to you all!
We hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year and are feeling refreshed and ready to start a new
term! We would like to thank you for all the wonderful and generous gifts we received for Christmas. It
is very much appreciated, thank you.
As always, we have a busy and exciting half term ahead. This term we welcome a trainee teacher into
Year 4. Mr Moss will be working alongside Mrs Holt and Mrs Hunt with your children. He came in to visit
the class last term and is very much looking forward to getting started.
Listed below are some of the things Y4 will be learning about during the next half term.
English
Mrs Holt will be doing a fiction unit on Stories from another culture. We will
be reading Sugarcane Juice by Pratima Mitchell, set in Pakistan. We will
explore the vivid descriptions and action in the story, and the way tension and
pace is maintained. We will then use these ideas and techniques explored to
write our own additional episode to the story.
Mrs Hunt will be looking at Explanation texts. In this unit children will read and
respond to explanatory texts and visual explanations. We will explore the
structure of explanatory texts and write features of explanations. Finally
children will plan, speak and write their own explanations.

Ways to help

We are aiming to get the children to read five times a week. Please sign in the reading diary when
your child has read. Allow time for your child to discuss what they have been reading. What did they
enjoy about the book? Who was their favourite character? Why? How was the setting described?
How did the author maintain your interest? Etc.

Maths
We will begin the term by looking again at number and place value ensuring we can
identify the value of each digit in a four digit number. We will round numbers to
the nearest 10 or 100, before moving on to working on our skills with addition and
subtraction. We will then explore angles as we learn how to identify obtuse and
acute angles and compare and order angles by size. We will use formal written
methods to solve worded problems involving multiplication and division. Finally we
will develop our understanding of measures as we explore length, and look at
converting between different units of measurement. (eg. Km to m)

Ways to help

Continue to practise recall of times tables facts, including related division facts.
Can your child tell the time to the nearest minute? Do they know what time they get up, go to
school, have lunch?
Learn the days of the week and the months of the year.

Science
This half term we are learning about Living things and their habitats.
We will look at how living things can be grouped in different ways. We
will explore our local environment to find living things and use
classification keys to help us group them. We will research how
environments can change, both natural and human-led change, and the
positive and negative impacts these changes can have on living things.

Ways to help

Have a look at what living things you can find in your garden! Research
them using books or the internet. What conditions do they like to live
in? What do they eat? What position are they in the food chain? Why
not take a photograph of it or draw a picture of what you have found
and bring it in to school?
Creative Curriculum
Geography - North America
Computing Databases
RE Hindu Dharma
Art Painting landscapes.
PE - Dance and Gymnastics
French Carnival of the animals
Music American Jazz music and improvisation.
PSHE Going for Goals
Reminders

Homework is handed out on Tuesday and should be handed in by the following Monday.
Spellings are given out on Friday for a test the following Friday.
PE continues to be on Monday each week and also a Tuesday or Thursday. Please ensure your
child has full PE kit in school, long hair is tied back and any earrings are removed.
Reading books should be in school every day. Please record any independent reading done at
home.
Library day is Monday where your child has the opportunity to borrow a book to read and return
the following week.
Dont forget to visit our class blog with your child to have a look at some of the things we have
been up to! This can be found at http://harrisprimaryschool.net/

Thank you for your continued support, please do not hesitate to contact either of us if there is
something you wish to discuss either in person, by phone or via email at

s.holt@harris.lancs.sch.uk
j.hunt@harris.lancs.sch.uk
Kind Regards
Mrs. Hunt and Mrs. Holt