Phenomenal Forest School!

We have had a fantastic start to the new half term! The children have started their new topics and have enjoyed many exciting learning opportunities.   Our topic...

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We have had a fantastic start to the new half term! The children have started their new topics and have enjoyed many exciting learning opportunities.

 

Our topic this term is Survival. We are going to be learning about how people survive in different circumstances and how animals adapt to survive in different environments. We had our first playful enquiry sessions this week where the children learnt about the Semaphore flag system, explored Ordinance Survey maps and invented their own animals who have special features that help them survive in different places in the world.

Linked to our topic of survival, the classes had their first Forest School sessions this week. During these sessions, the children worked in two groups. One group practised tying knots and the other group used the iPads to make a risk assessment of the forest and mapped out the area using Ordinance Survey symbols. The groups will swap over next week. If your child learn how to tie knots this week, see if they can teach you what they learned!

In English, we read the story ‘The Journey,’ which is about a family who have to leave their home due to war breaking out in their country. The book follows the family as they make a treacherous journey across land and sea to a country where they can be safe. The children discussed the book and identified the features of the main character in the story. They wrote character descriptions about her at the end of the week. We have been focusing on editing and improving our writing and the children have been thinking about their writing goals to help them with this. Next week we will be learning about refugees and writing newspaper reports to show our learning at the end of the week.

In Maths, we have been practising using written methods to subtract 4-digit numbers. We have been practising subtracting with and without exchanges. The children have been thinking about which subtraction problems they can solve mentally and which ones they need to use a written method for.

Maths Worksheets W1

Subtraction challenge

We have started our topic about sound in Science. We started this topic by focusing on listening to different sounds around the school. We spent (nearly) the whole session in silence so that we could focus on what we could hear. The children had to problem-solve to communicate with each other and found creative ways to do this. They shared many interesting reflections at the end of the session about what it was like to work and collaborate in silence and discovered that in the quietest space in the school, they could hear the largest number of different sounds.

Extra information:

Books: Please help your children to remember to bring their reading books and reading records on their book swap day. Book swap days will happen as below:

Amazon – Thursday
Nile – Friday
Thames – Friday

Guided Reading: we have started a new book this half term linked to our survival topic: Race to the Frozen North by Catherine Johnson

PE: The PE days for Year 4 are as follows:

Amazon – Friday
Nile – Thursday
Thames – Friday

Forest School: Please make sure your child brings in warm and waterproof clothes and shoes/boots for their Forest School sessions.  The timetable for Forest School is below:

Amazon – Friday
Nile – Monday
Thames – Tuesday