Year 4

Welcome to Year 4 2024-2025

Friday 14th March 2025: Week 3

What a jam-packed week! In English, we have started our new learning journey where we will be writing a non-chronological report about dragons. We have spent the week learning and developing our bank of tired words and rich and varied vocabulary using a variety of resources, which we can later use in our own writing. We already cannot wait to see what the children produce at the end because the vocabulary choices have been incredible! In Art today, we explored different materials and how we can 'manipulate' them in different ways to create our desired effect. We will ultimately be creating sculptures based on the art of Alberto Giacometti and explored how we can create that distinctive 'tall and thin' form that he is best known for. We used wire, plasticine and tin foil and explored how easy or difficult it was to manipulate each. In addition, we have been using our map reading skills and observation skills in Geography to find out where the Amazon Rainforest is and to find out about each layer of the rainforest: forest floor, understorey, canopy and emergent layer.

Friday 7th March 2025: Week 2

This week, Year 4 have worked so hard to write and finish their balanced arguments based on 'Should cities be built near rivers?'. Children have explored both sides of the argument and used their Health and Wellbeing and Geography previous learning to support their points with evidence and examples. In Maths, we have been dividing 1-digit and 2-digit numbers by 10 and 100 using a place value grid to make sure we understand how many tenths and hundredths the number ends up with.

It was lovely to see the children's World Book day costumes this year - they looked fantastic! We shared stories with Year 2, we read The Last Zookeeper by Aaron Becker as a class and then drew our alternative endings. It was a lovely afternoon.

Friday 28th February 2025: Week 1

We have had an excellent week back and hope everyone had a wonderful half term. The children have got stuck straight back in and have shown a brilliant attitude towards their learning and have wowed us with their knowledge shown this week - especially within our new learning journeys! In Geography this week, we had our 'Exploration Box' lesson where we rotated around three activities: VR headsets and iPad research; Map work; and Field work outside. In Art, we read a story to start off our new learning journey called The Emperor's Sculpture (as part of our Wise Reading) and then we were able to explore making our own sculptures based on different challenges like showing an emotion or making something to represent movement.

Friday 14th February 2025: Week 6

What a final week! Everyone has worked so hard on their narratives based on a clip from How to train a dragon and they have been so lovely to read. We enjoyed publishing these at the end of the week with an illustration to go with it.

It has been amazing to see how engaged and interested the children have been in our History learning journey this half term. This week, the children were tasked to create and film their own podcast or interview in order to answer our enquiry question - 'What were the key changes that happened during Queen Victoria's reign?' They were able to tell us all about how transport changed because of names like George Stephenson, how education had a massive change following the Education Act in 1833 meaning it was law for all children to attend school and also how the industrial world took off during this era.

Victorian Day has been so much fun, filled with toy making, cooking and weaving! The children said that they loved making the cup and ball game and many children also loved the drawing task. The children's outfits were amazing and they all loved the day - and so did we!

Friday 7th February: Week 5

This week we have performed our final Music pieces where we combined body percussion with tuned instruments to represent a rainforest. Throughout the weeks, we have built up our understanding of how the different layers of the rainforest might sound using musical vocabulary like texture, tempo, pitch and dynamics.

In Maths, we have been learning to multiply and divide using formal methods. We begin by using the concrete manipulatives for children to visualise the numbers and to support them in their methods and then move on to the formal written methods like column multiplication and short division.

The children have been loving learning about the Victorians and it has been so lovely to see their enthusiasm for learning and the discussions that have taken place in class. This week, we learned about the differences for rich and poor children going to school and completed some lovely pieces of writing to inform the reader about these key differences.

During Anti-Bullying Week, we have used the book 'We're all Wonders' in our assemblies and have completed some lovely activities based on the message of the book - to be ourselves and to be accepting of all others no matter what we look like or who we are! We have created an amazing gallery of us in our Reflection books to show that although we all look different and enjoy different things, we are all part of a family - a community - and we accept each other just the way we are!

Friday 31st January: Week 4

Wow - week 4 already! This week we have been learning more about eating and drinking 'dans le salon de thé' in French! We have learnt how to order our food and drink and even how to ask for the bill! 'Un croissant et un chocolat chaud, s'il vous plaît!'

In Science, we investigated how the decibels of a timer were effected using different materials as insulators. We tested how many dB the volume was without any covering and then tested again with bubble wrap, tin foil and fabric. We found that bubble wrap was the best insulator of sound and tin foil was the worst.

We have been working so hard in English to develop our writing and have been practising modifying nouns using adjectives and prepositional phrases. It has been lovely to work in pairs together and have lots of discussion to support each other in our writing.

Also, a big well done to everyone who is helping us in our Times Table Rockstars competition against Year 6 - so far we are in the lead but keep on practising everyone!

Friday 24th January 2025: Week 3

This week, Year 4 have been further developing their gymnastics skills by creating short routines in pairs demonstrating the different rolls we have been practising: straight, straddle and barrel. It has been lovely to see them collaborate and communicate effectively to put a routine together to a piece of music.

In Maths, we have been resilient in our learning of using the inverse - specifically to check the answer to a calculation. We used pictorial representations like part-whole models and bar models to support us in our learning. In English, we have started our newest learning journey using The Land of Roar as our text driver and we are already really enjoying it!

Friday 17th January 2025: Week 2

This week in English, we have been using Alice in Wonderland as our stimulus for writing. We have been practising varying our sentence structure and learning how to do this using a range of conjunctions.

In Science, we learnt about the inner ear and how sounds turn from vibrations into understanding the sound from the cochlea and in History we learnt about some key changes that occurred during the Victorian Era. What an incredible era to progress from riding bikes and horse drawn buses to building railways and underground trains!

Friday 10th January 2025: Week 1

It was so lovely to see Year 4 back this week after a wonderful Christmas break and everyone has been ready to get stuck back into their learning!

In Science we began our new unit of learning on 'sound' and started off with a bang - literally! We used the musical instruments to explore how sound is made, thinking carefully about how the vibrations were created to make the sound. In Design & Technology we have started off our career pursuits as engineers: we gave the children wires, a bulb and a battery and asked them to create a working circuit and they impressed us with their skills - some even adding a switch! We are all excited to make our own torches this half term.

In History, we started off with our Chronology Box lesson where we look through the box and think about our History timeline - recapping our knowledge of eras we have previously learnt about. We also put some pictures of Queen Victoria into order of her own timeline and then learnt a little more about her.

Friday 2nd December 2024

What a great week we have had! We have finished publishing our narrative endings for The Pied Piper and thoroughly enjoyed sharing these with Year 1, who were our intended audience. In Geography, we have been busy extending our learning of Rivers by researching the uses of rivers across the world and creating our own insightful fact files. In maths this week, we have turned our attention to telling the time to the nearest minute.

Friday 29th November 2024

What a great week we have had! In maths we were feeling quite festive and in preparation for the Christmas jingle we visited several stalls around the classroom each one provided a number of challenges which involved us using money to calculate and use our problem solving skills. In Geography we enjoyed learning about the physical features of a river and identified different features along a river's journey for example within the upper, middle and lower courses.

Friday 22nd November 2024

What a fantastic week we have had! In music we have enjoyed playing a rock and roll bass line.

We were busy observing changing states in Science and in Geography we enjoyed learning about the water cycle, understanding the processes of evaporation, condensation and precipitation.

Friday 15th November 2024

What a fantastic week we have had! In English, we have continued to enjoy the Pied Piper and have been writing dialogues as the characters concentrating on punctuating direct speech correctly. In Maths, we have turned our attention to measuring and had great fun designing and measuring zoo enclosures. Tree planting was a definite highlight this week, it was so nice to be out in the fresh air and to do our bit for the environment.

Friday 8th November 2024

We have had a great first week back. English this week has brought many opportunities for us to do some acting, hot seating and role playing as we familiarised ourselves with the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. We had fun conveying the thoughts, feeling and motives of the different characters. Our first lesson of Geography was centred around our exploration box and putting our geographical skills to use. We loved exploring the OS map to find local rivers, our school and even plotting a route to the nearest river. We located some of the world's longest rivers using an atlas and loved visiting the Amazon river using the V.R headsets.

Friday 25th October 2024

What an exciting week! This week in English, we have created our own narrative openings for a story inspired by The Promise. In Maths, we have been learning how to add and subtract fractions and Design and Technology brought much excitement as we adapted our original recipes and created our final products complete with packaging!

Friday 18th October 2024

What another great week! This week in English, we have started our new learning journey inspired by the book, The Promise. In P.E we were refining our rugby skills and taking part in mini tag rugby matches. D.T this week has kept us busy researching and designing packages for our biscuits. We just can't wait to make the final product!

Friday 11th October 2024

What an exciting week! In English, we have enjoyed writing and publishing our scientific journal entries describing our own islands, creatures and plants. In maths we have been mastering our short multiplication skills and in French we have enjoyed learning some catchy songs. A highlight this week was baking biscuits in design and technology, especially when we finally got to taste them.

Friday 4th October 2024

We have had another great week in year 4! In Maths, we have been learning about factors and multiples. In computing, we enjoyed making our own music using Chrome Music Lab. This week in English we have been busy planning our own Neverbelieve islands and the creatures which will inhabit them. To finish the week we have enjoyed practising our French conversational skills.

Friday 27th September - Week 4

Wow what a busy week we have had in year 4! We have enjoyed science and extending our knowledge of classifying living things. This week our focus was on plants. We learnt all about deciduous and evergreen trees, as well as, flowering and non flowering plants. We had fun exploring the school grounds identifying different plants and classifying them in different ways. We also enjoyed history where we are learning about the Anglo Saxons - there were lots of discussions about which key events we felt were the most significant. Finally the heat was turned up for some of us as we took our place in the hot seat to discuss whether we should change who we are to make friends.

Friday 20th September - Week 3

We have had a great week in year year 4. In English we have enjoyed exploring the book 'The Land of Neverbelieve'. Maths has kept us busy rounding 4-digit numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000 and we have learnt a rhyme to help us. Design and Technology has been another highlight and a wonderful way to finish the week. We have tasted different biscuits, identifying their taste and texture. We also looked at the packaging and who the target audience might be.

Friday 13th September - Week 2

What an amazing week for year 4! We are very excited about Design and Technology and are looking forward to creating our own biscuits. It was a lovely end to the week to practise our food preparation skills such as weighing, sieving and cutting.

Friday 6th September - Week 1

We have had a fantastic first week in year 4! We have been busy learning all about classifying animals in Science. We played a game of snap to discuss similar characteristics between animals. In History, we begun learning about ordering important historical events in chronological order and explored our chronology boxes. This week, we have begun our English learning journey based on the text 'The Great Kapok Tree' we have learnt about paragraphs and using apostrophes in our writing.

My New Year Group

Click on the crayon to find a booklet all about your new year group.

Have a look at what the Year 4 children got up to last academic year (2023-2024)...

Summer 2 Term Y4

Thursday 19th July 2024 Week 7 -

Racing our sling shot cars.

Thursday 11th July 2024 Week 6 -

Applying our design & technology skills to make sling shot cars.

Wednesday 26th June 2024 Week 4 -

Using the outdoor learning environment to learn all about measure!

Tuesday 11th June 2024 Week 2 -

During science we recreated a human mouth showing all the adult teeth including incisors, canines, pre molars and molars.

Friday 7th June 2024 Week 1 -

Today we perfected our map reading skills, locating different points in the world using longitude and latitude to ensure we were accurate.

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Week 6 -

This week in art we have been concentrating on the artist Jackie Morris who has created lots of illustrations, including the book 'The Lost Words' by Robert MacFarlane. We tried out lots of techniques including different paint strokes, using contrasting colours and different ways to apply the paint for different effects.

Wednesday 15th March 2024 Week 6 -

Highlights from Ufton Court

Wednesday 8th March 2024 Week4 - Ufton Court

Ufton Court update

We have arrived! What fantastic weather! All children are happy, fire drill complete and all children are happy with their friends in their rooms. Beds made and back outside or more fun. We have been in a Viking ship and learnt how to defend ourselves using an axe, sword and shield.

We have poor internet signal but will upload photos as soon as we can.

Ufton Court Evening update

We are loving this weather after tea.

A Viking Funeral!

Still not sleepy!

Day 2

All children had a good nights sleep and ate a good breakfast. Letting of steam before archery, lighting fires and Viking games.

Viking Archery

We have some expert archers in our year group.

Viking games!

Fire lighting is an essential skill for a Viking.

Down time!

The Viking feast!
We are all dressed up and ready to party Viking style. The food was amazing and we all ate so much!

Day 3

Good morning, another exciting day. Enjoying the sun before the great battle.

The Battle of Reading. Saxons meet the Vikings!

Friday 3rd May 2024 Week 3

In art this week, we have been learning about saturation and how the artist Jackie Morris used this in her work to show contrasting colours.

Friday 26th April 2024 Week 2 -

This week year four have been busy revisiting previous learning and exploring our history chronology boxes. We had forgotten we had learnt about lots of different monarchs and enjoyed talking about important historical events such as the Great fire of London.

Tuesday 16th April 2024 Week 1 -

Today, Year 4 were so excited as Open Box Theatre Company came to school to help us learn all about the lives of Viking raiders and traders. We learnt so many new and interesting facts including how the Vikings navigated our shores in longboats.

Friday 28th March 2024 Week 6 -

Look at our learning outcome, lanterns with working lights! We are so proud of our results!

Friday 22nd March 2024 Week 5 -

This week we have focused our learning on the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. We have focused on the meaning of the nonsensical words in each stanza. We loved it so much that we decided to focus on intonation, volume, tone and actions. Enjoy the results, we think it is amazing!

Thursday 14th March 2024 Week 4 -

This week in Year 4 we focused on what it means to be a Balksbury Citizen. We discussed how our 'Code of Conduct' helps us to treat each other with kind words. We then talked about how we remember the things that others say to us and how they 'Stick To Me Like Glue'. We celebrated our understanding and the effect words can have on us now and in the future by creating a year group banner.

Thursday 7th March 2024 Week 3 -

World Book Day: to celebrate our love of books, we shared our favourite books with Year 2. We loved hearing all about the books Year 2 loved and why they chose them. We also loved getting dressed up as characters from books we have read and shared.

Friday 1st March 2024 Week 2 -

This week we learnt to use our scientific skills to build our own electrical circuit. We made sure we could make the light a bulb work ready for when we make our own lanterns.

Friday 23rd February 2024 Week 1 -

This week we learnt to summarise the text 'The Promise' by Nicola Davies. We drew and summarised each key point in the story to gain a deeper understanding. We now understand that 'the girl's' heart was warmed by keeping her promise to the old woman. She planted the acorns and spread her warmth to others.

Thursday 8th February 2024 Week 6 -

In Year 4, Anti Bulling Day was celebrated with the children enjoying the text 'Kindness Grows' by Britta Teckentrup. Together we shared and discussed the meaningful messages in the story. Each child then wrote their own important message and added it to the Kindness Tree in the hall for everyone to share.

Friday 2nd February 2024 Week 5 -

Free Reading Friday was shared and enjoyed together by Year 3 and Year 4

Friday 26th January 2024 Week 4 -

Gathering figurative language from a variety of sources including VR Headsets to describe the animals and plant life we find in the natural world.

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Week 3 -

Test Valley Brass Band came to see Year 4. The children had hands on experience with a variety of different instruments and learnt all about them.

Friday 12th January 2024 Week 2 -

In science we experimented with tunning forks to understand what sound waves are and how they travel. We described what we could hear and hear. The table tennis ball bounced repeatedly when the tunning fork was placed against it gently. When the fork touched the water, the water splashed and made a ripple effect. From this we understood that sound travels in waves which you can not always see.

Friday 5th January 2024 Week 1 -

By looking at the artists Alberto Glacometti, Antony Gormley and Tessa Farmer to understand sculpture, scale and space. We then experimented with sculpture materials and techniques to manipulate and bind a variety of materials such as: card, paper, wire and cardboard.

Friday 15th December 2023 Week 7 -

Autumn Term has been such a learning journey full of wonderful experiences.

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Week 6 -

Today we made our jam tarts to please the 'Queen of Hearts' from Alice in Wonderland. The children enjoyed learning all the skills needed for cooking including budgeting, food hygiene, preparation, using equipment safety, following a recipe and preparing food before making it. The children ate their tarts and evaluated them. Miss Thompson enjoyed eating her jam tart with a nice cup of tea.

Wednesday 22nd November 2023 Week 4 -

We have been learning to identify the function of banks and the relationship we have with them. In this lesson, children had ‘borrow’ and ‘lend’ cards. They had to find a partner who had the same matching amount of money. This led to a discussion on the problem of not knowing who has money to lend and who has money to borrow, and finding someone who has or needs the right amount of money.

Thursday 16th November 2023 Week 3 -

This week, the children looked at some Victorian artefacts to explore and understand what life as a Victorian school child would have been like. Year 4 then experienced an actual day in the life of a Victorian school child coming into school dressed in period costumes. In Victorian times there was strict rules for children including boys and girls being separated whilst everyone faced the front of the class. Every child had to write with their right-hand using chalk and a blackboard. No left handers in 1870! Children learnt how to write using cursive letters, all sitting on the line perfectly whilst writing out poems such as Mary Had A Little Lamb. Times tables, The National Anthem, and the Lord’s Prayer were all learnt through chanting and repetition. Whilst enjoying the experience, the children quickly concluded that modern day learning is so much more fun.

Friday 10th November 2023 Week 2 -

Making decorations for our Balksbury Federation Christmas Jingle

Friday 3rd November 2023 Week 1 -

Test tasting and evaluating different jams in Design & Technology.

Friday 20th October 2023 Week 7 -

A patchwork of our memories inspired by the artist Faith Ringgold.

Tuesday 10th October 2023 Week 6 -

In maths we have been learning different ways to subtract numbers.

Friday 6th October 2023 Week 5 -

Our science learning journey this week.

Friday 29th September 2023 Week 4 -

Writing information texts all about Greta Thunberg.

Friday 22nd September 2023 Week 3 -

Art, learning about scale and proportion.

Friday 22nd September 2023 Week 3 -

Focusing in on the detail with each draft we draw.

Friday 15th September 2023 Week 2 -

In science we have been identifying and classifying insects.

Friday 8th September 2023 Week 1 -

Year 4 explore hand art!

Thursday 13th July 2023: Week 6

In Religious Education the children have been focusing on the key concept 'family'. They have explored how important it is to develop healthy relationships, forming firm family ties. These family ties were represented by making friendship bracelets with each other.

Friday 7th July 2023: Week 5 Arts Week

The children had an amazing time focusing on the African artist Esther Mahlangu. She inspired the children to explore the history of the art work, including the colours and symmetry of each piece. They are very proud of the individual art work on their own T-shirts.

Thursday 29th June 2023: Week 4

In geography this week, we compared old with new maps of Andover to see how much the town has changed over time. We also compared photographs of the school, looking closely at our school grounds and the surrounding area to see the changes over the years. Field work showed us how much of the school has been extended.