Welcome to Life at KPS for Year 4

Mr Sussmann and Mrs Agrawal 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.

January 2022

Art

Our artist this term is Irishman Jim Fitzpatrick.  We have been looking and discussing his work in great detail. In particular we have studied two of his paintings – an illustration of ‘Diarmuid and Grainne’ and ‘Grace O’Malley & Clare Island’ We noticed how Celtic knots are a big part of his art.  We have begun to look at tone and shading using a pencil.  We noticed how the lightness and darkness came from the pressure applied to the pencil.  We also used our fingers to smudge allowing us to get the exact tone.  We realised that the direction of our lines is also very important when using tone to create an object.

English

In English this term we are looking at the writing to inform skill.  The children have read and performed extracts from The Celtic legend of Diarmuid and Grainne.  Their published piece this term will be a newspaper article about one of the events that happen in the story.  We have been looking at the features of a newspaper article and using our English skills to write captions and headlines for our article.  We have also learned how to formulate 5W sentences and looked at examples from other news sources.

History

We have been learning about Bronze to Iron age in our new history topic.  The children have identified the importance of farming, originally developed by Neolithic people’s in Britain.  They have seen how the development of Bronze and Iron tools helped make farming more efficient.  This allowed Bronze and Iron age tribes to develop larger settlements such as hill forts as well as allowing people to develop specialisations such as cloth making and tool production.  We have looked at archaeological sources to make inferences about how people lived.

Maths

We started the term by looking at Kilometres and meters and how we convert between the two. We have also looked at perimeter of rectangles and rectilinear shapes. We have also looked at multiplying and dividing by 10 and by 100. We have discussed what this actually means and why it looks like a zero has just been added or taken away from the answer.  We used place value grids to help us visualise what happened to the digits and how they moved to the left or right depending on whether you were dividing or multiplying.  Finally, we looked at multiplying by zero.

Music

The children have continued to play the chime bars as accompaniments to a variety of pieces following pitches and rhythms.

They have begun to read crotchets and quavers and have written their own which they have learnt to play.

They not only play melodies but are beginning to play chords to songs.

They are continuing to pay attention to the changes in sound, dynamics, pitch, tempo, pulse and timbre.

Panjabi

In Year 4 this term we have been learning the 5 sets of Panjabi letters and revising our previous learning by reading Mukta words. Children also started to learn how to read and write words with Kannaa symbol. For speaking and listening our main focus has been on different types of fruits and vegetables. To make our learning interesting we used various interactive resources such as flash cards and pictures. Children are making posters for their favourite fruits and to extend their learning children are doing colours in Panjabi. Children are also learning how to give instructions in Panjabi. We are also learning about Chali Mukte (Forty Liberatores) in Panjabi.

PE

Children in Y4 have been 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 dreams and what steps we can take to help us achieve them. We discussed how a dream is a cherished ambition and/or aspiration.  We discussed how our dream may feel far away from us at the moment.  We realised we may have to break it down into steps to help us achieve our end goal.  We have also discussed how there will always be times in our lives when we are disappointed and how disappointment is a normal part of life and cannot be avoided.  We appreciated that we need to learn how to deal with small everyday disappointments so that when we do experience further, more difficult disappointments we have the right skills to deal with them.

Religious Education

Purim has been looked at in great detail in RE this month.  We learnt that it usually takes place before Passover and the reason why it is celebrated. Like many of the Jewish festivals we have discussed we were happy to see it had great importance with food, especially a jam filled biscuit called Hamentaschen.  We were lucky enough to make these in the school kitchen and take them home for our families to try.

Science

We have been exploring a new science topic this term.  Our subject is Biology and we are looking at living things and their habitats.  We started our term by looking at the 7 life processes.  In week 2 we took part in a BBC live lesson, linked to David Attenborough’s new BBC show ‘The Green planet’ We encourage the children to keep watching it on Sundays at 7PM on BBC1. In week 3   we looked at invertebrates and the children learned some amazing facts and played an invertebrate identification game.  In week 4 we had a visit from Elliot who taught us about mushrooms and helped us create our own mushroom farm in our classroom.

Sikh Studies

This term children have started 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 and all the history about it, also the location of this Takht and what it is used for today.

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