Author: Mrs Freeman

By the end of Year 4, children are expected to be able to;

read, write and convert time between analogue and digital 12- and 24-hour clocks

solve problems involving converting from hours to minutes; minutes to seconds; years to months; weeks to days.

The class have been working hard to grasp the concept of time. To aid understanding, we have used lots of time related resources.

Children need hands on and visual hooks to understand new concepts in Maths. Resources play a very important role and provide the children a ‘window’ in, to make sense of the problem at hand by touching them, playing with them, exploring the patterns and relationships which can make a huge difference between understanding for depth or just for procedure.

“Playing a time game has helped me to understand how to convert to digital.”

Question your child about time.

How many days in a fortnight?

True or false? There are seven months in the year that have 31 days?

A school day lasts for 6 hours and 35 minutes. How long is this in just minutes?

What is the difference between am and pm?

How many years are there in 9 decades?

 

 

It is important for the children to understand how we all have relationships with other people and how we need to have certain qualities, characteristics, attributes in order to maintain these relationships. The children need to understand that good relationships are so important to keep us happy and healthy. By understanding this they can begin to protect themselves when they recognise things going wrong

Today, we discussed a famous friendship that has spun over many years – Ant and Dec.

The children watched a clip about this well known duo  that showed their very strong and positive relationship. We then thought about why their relationship is so good and what attributes to a quality friendship.

Having made a list of positive attributes, we then thought about whether we could identify some of these attributes in ourselves. We should be proud of these attributes and the effect they have on friendships.
Can we think of another attribute that we would like to develop?

Year 4 were very honest about which attributes they could recognise that needing some developing.

“I would like to be more patient.”

” My anger is something I need to improve!”

“Sometimes I can be bossy and my friends get frustrated with me.”

 

 

 

To finish off our topic on sound, the children were set a task to design and make some ear defenders. The main objective was to find out which materials were the best to use to muffle or reduce sound.

The children looked closely at the resources available and then made predictions. They had to think carefully about making their tests fair.

• “I think that cotton wool will be best because you can pack it into all the space.”
• “The ear defenders need to fit securely to your head otherwise sound can still travel through to your ears.”

Time to get going ….

Time to test the ear defenders…

C

What a laugh we had! Ask your child to find out what happened.

Cooking with sound?

Year 4 staff and children thought about what ingredients, whilst cooking, would create sound. We came up with popcorn.

Honey and popcorn flapjacks

The children had to listen carefully to the sound of the popping corn and describe it. We all had great fun and the noisy flapjack tasted delicious!

• “I’ve had the best lesson ever.”
• “I understand how sound travels now.”
• “This learning has been great fun!”

Well done to all the children and many thanks to Mrs Pearson and Mrs Charlesworth for all their hard work. It has been a fun, and sometimes noisy, mini topic. We all now need some peace and quiet so enjoy the half term break.

 

I am aware of my route to school.
This week, the children were asked to explore their local area on foot.

We had some super pieces of work from filming a route to school using a camera attached to a dog’s collar to an ‘order my journey’ activity.

The children had spotted points of interest – houses, buildings, gardens, street furniture, historical landmarks, street names and local amenities, favourite shops, doctors and cafes.
We discussed points of improvement and spotted things that made our walk unpleasant. This included obstacles on the routes (pavements blocked with cars & bins), litter (where are the bins and whether littering is a problem) and difficult road crossings.

We will be adding all this information to a class map.

 

Today, we had a brilliant morning with five other primary schools at Trinity University for the Skipping School Year 4 festival. There was some fantastic skipping on display and all children got a chance to show the skills they’ve been learning at school and at home over the past few months.

We feel very proud of the children’s achievements It’s been great to see how the children have improved and shown resilience when learning the new skipping skills. A special well done to our medal winners.

‘It’s been so much fun!’

“I wasn’t very confident at skipping and now I am.”

 

Our next topic, Sound, started this week. We began by playing a game called Identify the Sound. This was great fun with some very interesting noises.

Following that, the class were asked to predict which areas in school would be the quietest and loudest. Then, off we went.

Year 4 were asked to complete their sound walk in total silence. The only sound was the beat of a drum to give them the next instruction. This was a great success!

The next part of our lesson was to find out how sounds are made and how they travel.

Using instruments and varying levels of noise, we learnt that sound is created when something vibrates and sends waves of energy (vibration) into our ears. The vibrations travel through the air particles to the ear.

• “The stronger the vibrations, the louder the sound.”
• “Sounds are fainter the further you get from the sound source.”
• “Sound changes depending on how fast or slow an object vibrates to make sound waves.”

Having discovered how sound travels through air, our next challenge will be to find out whether it can travel through water and solids.

Stay posted!

 

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Written by Milo

Year 4

On Tuesday, Year 4 were given a talk all about mental health.

What do we know about mental health?

Many thanks to Mrs Vickerman and her colleague who came into school to give this talk to the children.

Today, as part of our Living and Learning lesson, we all took part in a few mindfulness activities. Over the last few weeks, the class have been thinking about how our emotions affect us and what we can do to help us cope with different types of feelings.

We know that people can experience conflicting emotions at different times, such as times of loss and change, stress and anxiety and the children have learnt to recognise when and how to ask for help.
Alongside asking for help, Year 4 thought about some strategies to help themselves when an emotion takes over. One idea that we have experiment with is to try some mindfulness techniques.

Mindful awareness exercises help children develop concentration and self-awareness.

Today we focused on our breathing.

In this exercise,  the children were guided through a process of paying attention to their breathing.

MINDFULNESS FOR CHILDREN

The children in Year 4 have a ukulele music lesson every week. They have been working hard to learn to play this stringed instrument. The tutor has taught the class all about the chords on a ukulele and some basic songs.