Literacy

 

During Literacy, we have continued to finish our final class text and explored writing our own narrative, retelling the story from a different character’s perspective using the first person. This has helped us gain a deeper understanding of the books we are reading and the characters' feelings throughout. In spelling, we have been learning about words with Greek or French origin and how this affects the spelling of the word in the English language. During Grammar lessons, we have been learning more about phrases, clauses and subject verb agreement to improve our writing overall. Finally, year 4 completed their trips to Plaistow  Library and have begun the Summer Reading Challenge! This trip featured a surprise appearance from West Ham Football Club, who have promised a football signed by the entire Cup winning West Ham Team to whichever school in Newham manages to read the most books!

 

 

Maths

This term in maths, we have been recapping our basic skills using the four operations to help us solve single and multistep reasoning questions. We have also learnt how to use and recognise Roman numerals up to 100, and recognised positive and negative numbers on a number line. We then used this knowledge of positive and negative numbers to add and subtract them in reasoning style questions. We have previously learnt how to round whole numbers, and we used the same rule: “5 or more, let it soar. 4 or less, let it rest” to help us round decimal numbers to 1 and 2 decimal places. This taught us how to make more accurate estimations- especially when estimating amounts of money.

 

 

Topic

This term we have been learning about the Amazon. We began by recapping what we learned about South America during International Week and discovering more physical and human features of both North and South America. Once we had located these on a map, we moved onto comparing the Amazon River with the River Thames. Although the Amazon River is much, much bigger, we were surprised to discover that the River Thames is one of the cleanest rivers in the world! Both rivers are vital habitats for an abundance of wildlife. Finally, we looked at the environmental issue of deforestation. We learned about the impact it is having in the Amazon Rainforest and across the world. We debated whether it is the most important environmental issue in the world right now. Each class held a debate about whether deforestation is the most important environmental issue in the world or of there are more pressing environmental issues that need to be addressed.