Literacy

During Literacy, we read our final class text and continued to explore different genres of writing. We used our knowledge from our history and geography topics this term to write about relevant issues across the world. First, we wrote a newspaper report about deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest and then we wrote a letter to the British Museum saying whether we thought the Benin artefacts should be returned or not. Finally, year 4 completed their trips to Plaistow Library and have begun the Summer Reading Challenge!

 

Maths

This term in maths, we have been learning about co-ordinates and negative numbers. We looked at grids with four quadrants for the first time and learnt that the steps stay the same, even if the grid looks different. We recapped what we learnt about negative numbers from Year 3 by adding and subtractive negatives and began to explore how to multiply negative numbers. We returned to rounding which we looked at in the Autumn Term but this time we progressed to rounding decimal numbers. Finally, all our hard work on our times tables paid off as we took our times table test. 56% of children got 20/25 or higher.

Topic

In topic, Year 4 have been learning about the Ancient Kingdom of Benin, located in modern day Nigeria. This involved a trip to the British Museum where we looked at a variety of primary sources and artefacts. Even though we loved seeing the artefacts, it also gave us some time to consider and discuss if it is ethical that these items are in London, not Nigeria? We ended our unit by writing a letter to the British Museum to express our opinion about whether or not the artefacts should be returned.