Author: Miss Newman

We’ve started maths in Year 4 by reviewing the column addition they learnt in Year 3. I’ve been really impressed with how quickly your children have picked this back up.

We initially used Base 10 to help us represent the addition and when we were confident we moved onto just using the column method.

We revisited exchanging and discussed how we know when to regroup in column addition.

If the column sum is equal to 10 or more, we must regroup.

Help at home: ask your children to identify which of the following calculations will need regrouping? How do they know?

329 + 132

322 + 125

573 + 143

242 + 635

This week, in Living and Learning, we’ve been focussing on rules. As we’re settling back into school, it’s important we remind ourselves of our three school rules so we’ve looked closely at them and discussed why they’re important. We also discussed how we can demonstrate them around school.

We should have silent voices, empty hands and eyes on the speaker to show we’re ready and respectful.

We should always use our manners and say please and thank you to everyone.

We need to walk slowly and sensibly around the school so we don’t hurt ourselves or other people.

We’ve had some really interesting discussions this week about why we have rules and what would happen if there were no rules. It was great to hear your children’s ideas during our circle time session based around rules.

Following our school rules will make our school a happy, healthy and safe place to learn.

Help at home – think about our three school rules and talk with your child about what they might look like or sound like. Compare them with your rules at home. Are they similar? Are they different?

 

Hello!

Your children have had a fantastic start to Year 4 today and settled in brilliantly. It has been great to see how well they’ve adapted to the new routines and new teachers. We’re really looking forward to an exciting and successful year!

This Friday, your child will come home with a reading book and new Reading Record. Just like  in Year 3, they’ll need to bring in their Reading Records every Friday for Book Club sessions, where they’ll be set an activity to complete at home (more information on the activities are inside the Reading Record). It’s really important that your child reads daily. This not only develops their fluency but also their love of reading.

Important dates:

• PE – Wednesday and Friday
• Library – Monday
• Spelling test – Friday
• Times tables test – Friday
• Book club – Friday

Any questions, please ask!

Thank you so much for a fantastic year! It has been a real joy to teach this class and I am so proud of all of them for what they’ve achieved this year. Here are some highlights of our year…

Your children have been incredible and I’m really looking forward to seeing them continue to flourish as they move up through the school.

Enjoy Year 5!

This week at Moortown has been Being Healthy Week! All week we’ve been focusing on how we can stay healthy both physically and mentally. Here are some of our highlights of the week…

We started the week talking about healthy eating and how we can ensure we have a balanced diet. Your children were very knowledgeable on this and suggested various healthy meals/snacks that include all our important food groups.

We then were lucky enough to have a visit from British Military Martial Arts (BMMA). Your children played lots of fun games and got to showcase their new skills. They loved giving martial arts a go and exploring a new way of keeping fit.

This week, we’ve spoke a lot about mental health and its importance. We often find that doing things to promote our physical health, such as exercise and eating healthy, also help our mental health. Keeping our minds healthy is just as important as keeping our bodies healthy and we discussed various ways to do this. We played a fun game of self-care bingo where the children chose their favourite self-care techniques and had to act them out.

We had another excellent session with some visitors from City of Leeds Basketball. Your children did basketball in PE last year so this was a great opportunity to recap, learn and practise some basketball skills and ask the professionals all about their experiences in the sport.

One of our favourite moments of the week was our Hip Hop workshop with Phil. He spoke all about the culture of Hip Hop and how we can express ourselves through art, literature, music and dance. We then had the opportunity to watch Phil perform some amazing Hip Hop dancing and learnt a few moves ourselves! We all loved it!

As part of our Being Healthy Week, we had our annual sports day! It’s always a brilliant day in the sunshine and the children were all amazing. Medal or not, we were proud of all of your children as everybody demonstrated our School Games values:

• determination
• honesty
• passion
• respect
• self-belief
• teamwork

Your children always love a visit from D:Side and this week, the session was on drug education. We learnt all about alcohol – what it is, the laws around it and how we can stay safe and healthy when we’re older. We did some role plays of how to say no if somebody is trying to get you to do something you don’t want to. The session taught us some really important information and was fun and engaging too!

Overall, we had an amazing, jam packed week and learnt so much about how we can always stay healthy!

In our L&L sessions in Year 4, we’ve been looking at and discussing body image.

We began by thinking about the word ‘beauty’ and what it can mean. It’s important to realise that…

Everyone’s idea of beauty is different.

We talked about how media and advertising can make us think that beauty is to look one way or another.

However, some of these images may have been edited or changed to look a certain way. So, it is important that we do not compare ourselves to the images that we see online. Not everything we see online is real! We looked at two images and identified the edits that had been made between them.

We then thought about ourselves and how we are all beautiful in our own ways.

Help at home: watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpM499XhMJQ ) and have a discussion about it. Reinforce the idea that not everything we see online is real. 

In Science, Y4 have been looking at teeth. It’s really important that we look after our teeth because if we don’t, they can decay.

Sugar creates a sticky substance, called plaque, which can build on your teeth and become a home for bacteria. This bacteria can lead to tooth decay.  The protective layer of the teeth (the enamel) can wear away.

Certain food or drinks that are high in sugar or acid can damage our teeth and we must have them in moderation. To explore the effects of different liquids on our teeth, we conducted an EGGciting experiment.

We used the following drinks in our experiment:

Coke, vinegar, orange juice and water.

We conducted an observation over time to see the effects of these drinks on our teeth. However, instead of using real teeth for this experiment, we used eggs! An egg shell contains calcium – the same mineral that is found in our enamel (the protective layer on our teeth).

After leaving our eggs for 3 days, we removed them from their liquid and observed the changes.

The effects of these drinks were clear to see!

• The coke stained the eggshell brown.
• The orange juice decayed the outer layer of the egg shell.
• The vinegar caused the egg to grow in size and become bouncy and translucent.

What we can take away from this learning is that sugary or acidic food and drink can be harmful to our enamel. We should always brush our teeth twice a day, visit the dentist regularly and cut down on the amount of sugar we have to protect our teeth.

Help at home: try this experiment again at home but use different liquids to see their effect!

 

Today, Year 4 had food technology and made savoury scones! Lots of us had tried scones with jam and cream before but most of us had never eaten a savoury scone before, let alone made them.

They were full of healthy vegetables like courgettes, carrot and sweetcorn. This was to make them filling and a part of our balanced diets.

We worked in two groups to make a batch of scones so we all had to share the jobs. The two main skills we learned and practised were grating and kneading.

We had to be safe when grating the vegetables as it can be tricky to keep the slippery grater up-right! We made sure our fingers weren’t too close.

Kneading our dough was difficult to start with as the dough was quite sticky. We had to use lots of flour on the surface and on our hands to stop it from sticking.

Here are some photos!

The scones came out fantastically and the children loved them! They’re a yummy and healthy snack.

Help at home: use the recipe below to remake the savoury scones but try adding different vegetables.

In D&T this half-term, Year 4 are making a prototype of a go-kart.

A prototype is an early sample or model of a product used to evaluate a design.

The design criteria (what makes a product successful) for their go-kart prototypes are:

• It has to move freely.
• It has to be able to hold a person (eg a model figure).
• It has to have an electrical circuit in order to move.

We’ve discussed that before a product can be made, it must be carefully designed. Today, Year 4 drew annotated sketches of their go-kart designs and had to label all the components that they’re going to use. They completed both a birds eye view and a side view sketch.

I can’t wait to see their designs come to life!

Help at home: What would wellington boots need to be successful?

Can you come up with 3 design criteria?

1.

2.

3.