Welcome to Life at KPS for Year 4

Mr Sussmann and Mrs Thamu warmly welcome you to Year 4.

The aim of this page is to highlight some of the fantastic learning that has been happening in Year 4, this page will be updated monthly, with photographs and information about the learning we have completed during the month.

We hope you enjoy looking through these updates and do discuss your child’s learning with them to celebrate their success. We look forward to any suggestions you may have to make your child’s learning a pleasant experience.

February 2022

Art

The children have been practising their shading and crosshatching skills, to help them develop texture and the impression of depth and 3 dimensionality.  We have been exploring how to draw a Celtic knot and the children have been doing lots of practise at home.  The children will be creating their own Celtic knot designs in their art books complete with shading and texture work in order to create a gallery of images for display in our school gallery.

English

The children have been busy developing their journalism skills by looking at different aspects of newspaper writing. They have been writing their own captions and newspaper headlines. We have also been exploring the difference between fact and opinion and the children have been writing their own fact and opinion paragraphs.  The children have started planning their newspaper articles with a view to publishing them after half term.

History

We have continued looking at our bronze age to Iron age topic. The children have looked at what Iron age people might have eaten during the Iron age and discovered that they had to make everything they ate from scratch.  They also discovered that some Iron age Celtic people used bogs as ancient refrigerators and that some specimens of ancient, forgotten bog butter have been found in Ireland.  Apparently, it smells a bit cheesy but is still edible. The children used their new-found knowledge to design their own Iron age menus.  They have also been looking at Iron age art and have been using some of their art skills to design an Iron age brooch, Some of the designs have used a combination of Celtic patterns and mythical animals.

Maths

To begin the month, we continued with our multiplication and division work.  We have looked at dividing a number by one and itself.  We then moved on to look at Perimeter.  To continue with our multiplication theme, we looked at factor and factor pairs in great detail and learnt about prime numbers.  We have looked at multiplying numbers together using place value charts, partitioning and the column method.  For Chinese New Year we used our multiplication skills to create a picture of a dragon and also looked at their lucky number – 8 and the various ways a calculation could arrive at this number.

Music

The children have been singing songs related to their topic on the bronze age. The lyrics about mammoth hunters and building a fort, consolidates their knowledge of facts as well as their voice dynamics and tempo.

They have begun to read pitched notes on a stave and have labelled notes accurately.

Panjabi

In Year 4 this term we have been learning the 5 sets of Panjabi letters and revising our previous learning by reading mukta and Kannaa words. Children are reading simple sentences with these symbols in Panjabi. For speaking and listening our main focus has been on different types of fruits and vegetables. To make our learning more interesting children have been learning the names of different colours in Panjabi. we used various interactive resources such as flash cards and pictures. Children are making posters for their favourite fruits and their favourite colour.We are also learning about Chali Mukte (Forty Liberators) in Panjabi.

PE

Children in Y4 have been continuing with learning to play Hockey.  They have been practicing the skills needed to play the sport by taking part in stick and ball dribbling drills designed to improve control of the ball and hockey stick.

Fitness is a key factor when playing Hockey so we have been taking part in strenuous warm ups which have also helped warm us up in this cold weather!  We have learnt the correct way to hold the Hockey stick as well as run with the stick while keeping ourselves and those around us safe.

Children will be working on quick footwork skills and teamwork to improve on their game play.  These skills are transferable to many other team and individual sports and we will be discussing this in our lessons.

PSHE

In PSHE we looked at our hopes and how feelings change according to what we are hoping for.  We looked at how we may lean on family, friend’s, local community and our faith to help us through difficult times when hope is all we may have.  The children then thought about a particular person in the class and wrote postcards to them thinking about their future as a way of telling them what good things they hope will happen to them.

Religious Education

In RE we looked at how the Jewish people travelled for forty years across the desert to the country we now call Israel. On the way they accepted the ten commandments, the laws by which they should live in their land. We discussed these commandments and realised that there were many other religions that also live by the same rules.  As a class we came up with commandments of our own that we wanted to abide by in life.

Science

In Science this month we have continued our exploration of living things and their habitats.  We had an exciting lesson using the microscopes where we looked closely at an onion skin and drew the cell structure.

The children have been exploring vertebrates and have been learning about classification trees.  We have also been watching our mushrooms develop in class and we have been seeing how once the mycelial network develops the mushrooms begin to sprout out of the bottles in bumpy balls and then develop into full grown Fungi.  We also investigated the parts of a microscope and drew a cross sectional diagram of an onion dermis.

Sikh Studies

This month children have been learning about the ‘Panj Takhts’ (Five Supreme Seats of Authority for Sikhs). The children have learnt the names of the ‘Panj Takhts’ and some brief facts about them. They have now started learning about each one in more detail.

So far, the children have learnt about Sri Akal Takht Sahib, Sri Patna Sahib and Sri Kesgarh Sahib in more detail. Not just about all the history for each Takht but also the location of this Takht and what how it is used for today.

Children explained about Sri Patna Sahib in their books using facts they had learnt in class.