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.

November 2020

DT

In DT this month we have received a baking challenge.  The children must design and bake a tropical rainforest inspired cupcake.  We spent some time in the kitchen experimenting with an egg free cup-cake recipe. Working in groups, the children developed whisking, sifting, measuring and folding skills to create their chocolate or vanilla cupcakes.  They all had the chance to take a couple home with them, which some lucky parents had the benefit of tasting.  Our experience in the kitchen taught us the care and technical skill required for successful baking and showed us that even with the same recipe we can have many different baking results.

English

We have been looking at fronted adverbials, 3ed sentences and examples of greater depth writing during our English lessons, in order to prepare us for our creative writing task this term.  We have been exploring how best to write 3ed sentences by creating word clouds with as many ed suffix words as we can think of.  We thought of boring sentences about the rainforest such as ‘The monkey kicked the snake’. Then we added 3 relevant ed suffix words to make a 3ed sentence ‘Excited, encouraged, dumfounded, the monkey kicked the snake.’ Finally, using the skills we had fine tuned during our greater depth writing analysis we found the nouns and verbs and added adjectives and adverbs to create really exciting sentence ‘‘Excited, encouraged, dumfounded, the cheeky monkey aggressively kicked the scaly snake.’

Geography

Our new geography topic this term is rainforests.  We started off by looking at where rainforests can be located by developing our atlas research skills. We learnt that atlases, not only show where places are but also what sort of vegetation can be found.  Atlases help us understand the physical, social and geographical nature of the world. We continued by examining the different layers of the rainforest and discovered that each of the four layers of the rainforest were teeming with life. Each animal and organism adapted to best survive in its environment.  During home learning we have been learning about how different plants use adaptations to survive in the extreme conditions of the rainforest. We learnt that a tree called the mangrove filters salty water through its leaves and that a pitcher plant liquifies and eats small frogs.

Maths

We have been looking at techniques for adding and subtracting 4 digit numbers this month. Based on the maths skills and knowledge we have developed during last half term about place value, we have found that by following simple rules and remembering each place value is 10 times the previous place value it is easy to add and subtract large numbers. We have been using counters to learn about exchanging and working on our column method skills to subtract numbers.

During home learning we have been reviewing our knowledge of lengths and learning about Km.  We will use this knowledge to begin learning about perimeter in December.

We have also been doing daily maths practice with our number of the day, were we pick up fluency and quick calculation skills.  We have learnt a good trick, for instance, for adding together a sequence of numbers from 1 to 20.

Music

This month, year 4 have been continuing to create their own rhythmic pieces using drums, body percussion and reading notation.

They have used their topic of ‘Rainforests ‘ for inspiration in their work.

They have also learnt about samba rhythms and how to play a samba piece using body percussion.

PE

In PE, we have been focusing on getting our fitness back with lots of exercise!  We have been working hard on improving our stamina by running, speed walking and skipping!

We have been taking part in the daily mile walk as well as participating in shuttle runs which have been designed to increase in difficulty from week to week. Skipping has fast become a very popular hobby at our school and for the last few weeks we have been trying to learn the Double Dutch.

PSHE

We have been examining themes around e-safety and bullying in PSHE this month.  For our bullying lesson we looked at what the definition of bullying was and at the different ways in which people can be bullied or bully.  We discussed physical, social, emotional and cyber bullying as a class and came to understand how it might feel to be bullied and began to discuss why a bully might bully someone else.  We learnt that bullying isn’t just something that happens in school but that adults can also be victims of bullying and discussed the bullying scandal currently happening in parliament.

In order to better understand the causes of bullying and how to resolve it, we acted out situations where someone was being bullied and a resolution for that behaviour.

RE

We have been looking at Christianity and beginning to look at some Christmas traditions in RE this term.  We sung All things bright and beautiful as a class and talked about the words and the meaning behind them.  We are looking forward to learning more about the Christmas story in the upcoming weeks and learning the traditions and customs surrounding Christmas in the UK and around the world.

Science

We have been learning about living things this month.  We have learnt that all living things have seven life processes in common. Whether the life form is an amoeba or an elephant, all of them move, respire, are sensitive, take nutrition, excrete, reproduce and grow. The acronym MRS. NERG helps us remember these life processes.  We learnt that some things like computer viruses may grow, multiply, be sensitive and move but if they are missing even 1 life process like respiration for instance they are not alive. We started by looking at the features of plants and trees and during home learning this week we have been exploring invertebrates, we will carry on looking at different branches of the animal kingdom during our future lessons.

Sikh Studies

This month we have been learning about Gurdwara Bangla Sahib in Delhi and how it helped the poor people during the national lockdown in India. It was thanks to Bangla Sahib that so many of the hungry got fed who were unable to work or get food in India’s lockdown.

Children looked at news reports of what Bangla Sahib did during lockdown and then did a role play of how Bangla Sahib helped those poor people of Delhi. Then to understand about compassion and Seva, children wrote down how the different people in their role play were feeling, from those making the Langar to those receiving it.