Year 4 Class News

History: Athens vs Sparta!

Today, Year 4 held a debate over which Ancient Greek city state was better – Athens or Sparta.

The children used the city state fact files they’d made in the previous lesson to debate over topics including the economy, education, women’s rights and the government.

We learnt some top tips for debating:

• Have confident body language.
• Prepare arguments to counter your side’s weaknesses.
• Use key debating vocabulary (e.g. “You make a good point. However…”).
• Listen carefully to the other side so you can respond appropriately.
• Project your voice.

Although Athens won the debate, all children demonstrated brilliant debating and oracy (speaking and listening) skills. It was fantastic!

Help at home: Practise the top tips for debating at home. Should children have to go to school on weekends? Should video games be allowed in school?

Autumn term clubs

Living and Learning: Rules

This week, in Living and Learning, we’ve been focussing on rules. We’ve looked closely at our three school rules and discussed why they’re important and how we can demonstrate them around school.

We should look at the speaker to show we’re ready and respectful.

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

We need to walk slowly and sensibly around corners 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’s been great to hear your children’s ideas.

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?

Welcome to Year 4!

The children have had a fantastic start to Year 4 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 week, your child will come home with a reading book and new Reading Record. 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

Any questions, please ask!

Y3/4 Spelling list for half term 1

In Key Stage 2, instead of asking you to learn a short list of spellings each week, you will be given a longer list (roughly 40 words) that we will focus on in that half-term. Don’t worry, we’re not asking you to learn them all in one week. Instead, we’ll ask you to focus on learning these words over the course of the entire half-term. There’s a few reasons for this:

1. We want you take responsibility for your own learning and start to figure out how you learn best (there’s some ideas below). Even if that means making some mistakes along the way.
2. Lots of research suggests that learning more spellings over a longer time leads to better remembering how to spell them in the long-term.
3. Similarly, lots of research suggests that if you learn something for a week and don’t come back to it you’ll likely forget it anyway
4. We won’t have a ‘formal’ test each week. Instead, we’ll mix it up. We might ask you to test each other on the words you’ve been learning. We might test the words at random and then you’ll know which words you need to practise more and which words you’re confident with. We might just think about some of the words and share ideas for how we’re going about learning them.
5. Ultimately, we want this to be about learning – and not just getting them right in a test.

How you decide to do this is up to you. You might decide to focus on the trickiest words first. Or, you might decide to learn 8 words a week and really focus on these whilst still practising the others, too. For some of you, you might already feel confident with some of the words so might choose to not practise these at all. However you decide to do it is up to you. The important thing is that you’re learning them and learning how you like to learn them best.

Every Friday, we’ll spend time practising or testing (informally) or discussing all things spelling so be ready (one of our 8 Rs for learning) to join in!

If you need some ideas for practical things to do, check out the Super Spelling Strategies Guide on the school website.

Half-term 1

This half-term, our spellings are linked to the rules and strategies we’ll be learning in class:

• alternative ways for writing the ‘ay’ sound
• alternative ways for writing the ‘ee’ sound
• ‘double up for a short vowel sound’
• ‘drop the e for ing’
• ‘drop the y for an i’
• adding the suffixes ed, ing
• homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently)

Each Friday, you’ll be tested on 8 of the words from the list below.

School Games Mark Platinum award

We are delighted to announce that we have achieved the School Games Platinum Mark Award for the 2023/24 academic year.

The School Games Mark is a Government-led award scheme launched in 2012, facilitated by the Youth Sport Trust, to reward schools for their commitment to the development of competition across their school and into the community, and we are delighted to have been recognised for our success.

As part of our application, we were asked to fulfil criteria in the areas of participation, competition, workforce and clubs, and we are pleased that the hard work of everyone at our school has been rewarded this year.

Thank you to all the children who have represented school at different inter school events and competitions, parents for their support and staff for accompanying the children. We look forward to more events this year.

We are very proud of our children for engaging with these physical activities both in and out of school to support our ethos of being a happy and healthy school.

Thank you and goodbye!

On behalf of myself, Mrs Burgess and Mrs Charlesworth, we would all like to thank you for our gifts. It is extremely generous and kind of you.

I would also personally like to say thank you for all your kind words and messages this past week.

It has been a pleasure to teach your children for the past two years and watch them grow. It has also been a pleasure to get to know you all and I am so thankful to have worked with such friendly, supportive parents.

We have had a fabulous last week together and I will remember each and every one of them as I embark on my next chapter.

With love, Miss Needham x

Living and Learning: Safety Week

Last week, Moortown Primary School were thinking all things ‘safety’.

Year 4 took part in a variety of workshops that included road safety, water safety, online safety and how to be safe around dogs!

Our favourite sessions was definitely when we took a trip to Roundhay High School to learn about how to be safe when trampolining and climbing.

Help at home by asking your child how they stayed safe on the trampoline and climbing wall!

Staying safe week: road safety

Jake, from the Leeds City Council road safety team, gave a whole school assembly all about staying safe on and around roads including different types of active travel.

Don’t forget, as part of our staying safe themed week, we are running our active travel safety competition this week.

For a chance to win one of three £10 Love2Shop vouchers, we’d love to see your active travel staying safe photos, maybe using a traffic crossing or wearing a bike helmet (send photos to moortownoffice@spherefederation.org). Photos should be sent by 4pm on Thursday 11 July and winners will be announced on Friday 12 July.

Help at home: Jake reminded us of the green cross code. Talk to your child about what we need to remember when crossing the road.

Staying safe: online safety

Louise from West Yorkshire Police gave a whole school assembly all about staying safe online.
There were lots of clear online safety messages around content, contact and conduct.

At the end of the assembly, the children reflected on what they were going to do after hearing Louise’s messages.

I am going to check my younger sisters’ Roblox settings.

I am not going to accept friend requests from people I don’t know.

I am not going to play games that have a age rating older than me.

Help at home: ask your child how content, conduct and contact are linked to online safety.