Welcome to Year 4 2020-2021. Let's make this year rock!
Summer
|
Film Night! For the first time in St Thomas Aquinas history, every single member of a class attended a film night! It was so lovely having the whole class together enjoying their hot dogs and treats before settling down to watch a wonderfully funny film. Everyone had a blast. Hopefully this is another Year 4 memory they will never forget. |
|
English Our first English unit of this term is based on the story Sugar Cane Juice by Pratima Mitchell. We heard three versions of the story with more and more detail being added each time. By learning the story in parts, with added expression and action, we were able to recall the majority of this story. Before writing our follow-up episodes to the original story, we spent some time using dictionaries and thesauruses to strengthen our vocabulary. |
|
Earth Day On Thursday 22nd April, it was international Earth Day. To celebrate this day we joined in with CAFOD's virtual assembly 'Eyes of the World' which taught us about the different ways we can make a difference for our own and future generations. The climate is in crisis and it affects us all. We learnt that Britain is hosting leaders from around the world in the United Nations climate change talks - COP26. We designed masks, with hard-staring eyes, to let the government know that we are watching them and encouraging them to start making the change our Earth desperately needs. |
|
PE Our first PE session this half term involved us practising 5 different, netball-related, skills. We learnt about pivoting, chest passes, shooting and how to defend. |
| Next, we demonstrated our skills in football and proved that we are a class of terrific toe-tappers, dazzling dribblers and super shooters. |
|
Orienteering In our final outdoor learning lesson, we set up an 11-point orienteering course around Hartshill Park. Keeping in our groups to ensure we stayed safe, we raced to find all 11 points. The sun was shining and all of us had a blast! |
|
Collective Worship To celebrate the penultimate week of Easter, Year 4 voted on how to hold a collective worship. Everyone wanted to gather together outside and listen to a passage of the Bible retelling the Resurrection. Evana read this beautifully and everyone reflected upon the story before sharing a personal prayer in our prayer garden. The worship was followed by everyone reverently and discerningly. |
|
Art This half term we have learnt about a few Italian artists. One of our favourites was Michelangelo. He spent lots of his time, painting the Sistine Chapel, on his back painting above him. We gave this a try in the hall and have a new found respect for everything he did. We absolutely loved this artistic experience. |
|
Science This half term we have learnt about the different states of matter. We looked at the four ways you can change states and most enjoyed becoming chocolatiers and melting solid chocolate into liquid chocolate so that we could decorate a cake. |
| To conclude the unit we went into the hall and tried to complete a states of matter quiz where the answers, and a few red herrings, were hidden. |
|
Eco-Warrior Challenge We thoroughly enjoyed being 'great gardeners' planting seeds in our school grounds today. Miss Coxon set us an eco-warrior challenge to create a flowered area where wild insects could grow and live. |
|
Skills Builder Challenge Day Oh my goodness, you will never believe what happened at school today? Aliens, YES ALIENS crash landed on our school grounds. What a mess their spaceship left! However, the 'mess' gave us clues to help us with the different activities we had to complete throughout the day. In total, we completed eight activities where we had lots of fun applying the eight essential skills. This included decoding a letter from the aliens, designing gadgets to help them survive on our planet and finally designing a food menu for the aliens. We had a wonderful day, applying our skills and we all received certificates in the skills we excelled in! |
|
Reading Challenges Our first reading challenge was completed as a whole school and at 10am we all read for 10 minutes. We enjoyed this extra opportunity to enter another world within our books. |
|
Science In our final half term of Year 4, we have been learning about Sound. We started our unit with lots of different demonstrations of how sound is caused by vibrations. In the following lesson we investigated whether the size of the vibration, the amplitude, is different depending on the volume, loudness, of the sound. |
Spring
|
Remote Learning Thank you to everyone for being 'Lockdown Legends'. Children, you have continued to impress me with your enthusiasm for learning and effort in your work. Parents, you have supported your children's education, kept them entertained and most importantly safe. We have continued to access so much work from our Long Term plan and are not behind. Please do not worry that you are going to struggle now that we are back at school. You are amazing. Thank you. |
|
Outdoor Learning This week we enjoyed some orienteering. We used a map of the school grounds to identify 'orienteering controls'. After this, we tried to create a map, in the style of the Romans, by only recording 'substantial features'. These are objects, either physical or human, which remain unmoved for a long period of time (buildings, trees, paths etc). |
|
Art This term we have been learning about the Romans. We discovered that the Romans used to make intricate mosaics and we thought we'd like to give it a go too. We used the artistic skill of printing to create our masterpieces. |
|
PE Since returning to school we have practised lots of different sporting skills. Take a look at our different slide shows below. |
| Volleyball |
| Cricket |
| Sir Captain Tom Moore's 100 Challenge |
| Superstars! |
|
Collective Worship To celebrate the season of Lent we came together in a beautifully reverent collective worship. |
|
French After a few weeks learning different countries, days of the week and weather types, we decided to become French Weather Presenters. We hope you like our forecasts. Click on our pictures below and a video should begin. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
English Since returning from lockdown, we have spent our English lessons looking at myths and legends. We read a myth called 'Dreams of Destiny', which was about Aeneas, a Trojan man, who leaves Greece to found the Roman Empire. We looked at the features of myths and completed some short bursts of writing description and dialogue before writing our own myths 'Dreams of Destiny: part II'. We hope you enjoy our work. |
|
Science During this term, it was British Science Week. To consolidate the learning we had been doing over lockdown, we conducted two experiments relating to teeth and the NHS role of Dentists. We placed eggs into different liquids to investigate the speed of decay on our teeth (Did you know the shell of an egg is similar to our teeth's enamel?). The results were gross! We also put three different toothpastes through a testing exercise to see which was the best. We hope you enjoy our pictures as much as we enjoyed our experiments! |
|
Coronavirus Day of Reflection To mark a year since we first went in to lockdown, the whole school created daffodils as a symbol of hope for the future. Year 4 thoroughly enjoyed painting with their fingers (and whole hands eventually). We also contributed to a whole school display by completing the blue section of a rainbow. |
|
DT As part of our Outdoor Learning, we created coil and pinch pots. We discovered where the Romans would get their clay from and the techniques they would use to make their pottery. We hope you like our final designs. |
|
English Our first unit in Year 4 was poetry! We researched lots of different features that poets used and became experts at personification! We wrote our own poems about the start of a school day, keeping in mind that we would be performing these poems to Year 3. We loved writing our poems and Year 3 loved hearing them. |
| For the next 4 weeks in English, we completed pieces of writing based around the story 'The Egyptian Cinderella'. We worked through many Key Writing Skills and wrote some wonderful diary entries, letters and narratives. Have a look! |
|
Maths Year 4 have continued amazing me in Maths. I remember back to Year 2 when we all passed the SATs test! If Year 4 keep working as hard as they are, the sky isn't even a limit for them in Maths! Here are some of the pieces of work we have completed in our Place Value and Addition and Subtraction units. |
|
Art One of the revelations of the year so far has been our (including Mr Washington's) improvement in drawing skills. We completed a baseline drawing of different facial features before completing some tutorials on drawing these with added detail and shading. After drawing our realistic Egyptian Death Masks, we went all abstract and cubist by celebrating Pablo Picasso and using our new and improved facial drawing skills to create cubism masterpieces. |
|
PE In PE this half term, Y4 have mastered their Ultimate Frisbee techniques. By the end of the unit we were able to have an efficiency competition which was won by... St. David's team. |
|
RE Many of our class took their next big step in their journey of faith this half term by taking their first holy communion. Congratulations to you we are so proud of the work you put in to it. In class, we looked at the Creation story and how we are made in the image and likeness of God. We then learnt about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. |
|
To conclude our second unit, learning about the Rosary, we held a Collective Worship. All children were reverent and prophetic, making beautiful reflections after the worship. |
|
Topic Our topic, Enchanting Egyptians, has been fast-paced, fascinating and fun! We have identified the Ancient Civilisations in time and place, researched different Pharaohs, understood why the River Nile was important and the features of the river system, acted out and explained the water cycle, and researched different elements of Egyptian daily life. |
|
TTRS How could we not start this half terms website with the TTRS competition. What an achievement! Year 4 blew everybody out of the water and only went and won the Stoke-on-Trent competition. I am so incredibly proud of them all and I hope you are too. We have had our photo taken for the Sentinel and once we have a copy we will upload it here and let you all know. |
 |
 |
|
Computing This term we have created algorithms which produced repeating pattern designs. We used a programme called 'Microsoft Logo' and used lots of coding terms. It was a a challenge but one that we aimed high and achieved. |
|
DT Linking to our Egyptian topic, we have sewn headresses. Mr Washington was amazed with our stitching skills and we loved creating and wearing our masterpieces. |
|
PE This half term we have taken part in another inter-school competition by completing 5 'cross-country' length runs. We were timed in each race and aimed to beat our own score. No-one, not even Mr W, could get close to Chebe's time! The quickest three times were entered into the town event. We will update the result when it is finalised. |
