WOW! What a wonderful start to the year we have had in year 4. We have explored the book 'Bottled' all based around our feelings and the importance of sharing our emotions. We were inspired by this book and Picasso to create artwork based around cubism. 

To begin, in our unit of Literacy, we were visited by Timmy! We asked lots of questions and were very excited by our furry friend. We can not wait to see what else Autumn has in store for year 4! 

 Rowan and Cedar have shown lots of enthusiasm during lessons for their summer term topics. 

We have been developing drawing skills, including the use of techniques such as hatching and shading as well as charcoal and drawing with an eraser to create realistic 3d drawings of compositions involving everyday items. We have also used collage techniques to begin to explore printing techniques and are looking forward to experimenting with wax resist techniques before designing and creating our final outcomes.

All Year 4 pupils have been busily practising and applying rapid recall of multiplication facts little and often throughout the week. The Year 4 team have been very impressed with the effort and enthusiasm shown towards this. Well done Year 4 and keep the great effort going! This will definitely support the upcoming Multiplication Tables check in June.

Year four have enjoyed kicking off the summer term with investigating, designing and making their own torches. We re used plastic bottles and applied our learning in Science lessons to create and add an electrical circuit including switches we made ourselves using cardboard, paper fasteners and paper clips. We are looking forward to including additional design features as our next step. 

In computing, we have been animators and so far have investigated different types of animation and learnt about some features of animation programs, such as 'onion skinning' (a technique to see and work with several frames at once).

In music lessons, we have been appraising songs by the Beatles and accompanying these with singing and instruments. We are really looking forward to creating our own compositions linked to these songs.

Last week, we were lucky enough to have an author visit. David Owen shared some of his books with us and spoke to us about his journey to becoming an author and his inspiration for writing his books.

As part of World Book Day, we read a book called The Tower. Further to this, will delved deeper into the characters and had fun using drama to explore the conversations the children might have had with the tree man. We then went on to gather natural materials and created our own tree characters.  

This week Year 4 started the week with a webinar session for British Science week. We enjoyed hearing from a STEM Ambassador, Liz Tinlin, who introduced us to how the planet has changed hugely over its long life and continues to change. We found out about the planet formation, surface erosion, plate tectonics, volcanoes, and even meteorite impacts. 

This week in Year 4 we have been writing our own playscripts. Whilst in the Egyptian section of the British  museum, two mummies woke up and Year 4 had to decide what adventures they would have in Stevenage. Some chose for the chaos to commence in the bowling alley, Gravity and the cinema. We had great fun using the features of playscripts to write about our characters adventures.

In art, we have continued to look at artwork and patterns from Ancient Egypt art. We have now started to design and plan our own scrolls based on the theme ‘ourselves’ We thought carefully about how to compose our designs and experimented with colours that we thought would work well together. We had to think carefully about the colours we picked as the Egyptians used mainly browns, reds, blues and yellows.

As part of Safer internet day, we thought about the things that we need to do to make sure we are safe when using technology. Then, we listened to some raps about internet safety before we had a go at writing our own to share our messages. It was great fun thinking of the rhyming couplets and having a go at performing them in a rap style

It has a busy start to the term in Year 4. In art, we have been getting creative and drawing and then painting our final pieces. We had to arrange five items to create a still life composition with a theme. We then looked carefully at this and sketched it out before using water colours to paint it. We used black and white to help create shades of our colours, which allowed us to achieve a 3D picture.  

In Literacy, we are writing fantasy stories. We started the unit by exploring the main character in the story of Aladdin and watched clips from different versions of the story to inspire us. We have enjoyed developing our characters and building up the setting at the start of our stories.  

Our new science unit is all about sound. This week we have been looking at different types of sounds and how they can be made. We’ve had fun trying to make sounds that fit certain criteria. For example, loud, high-pitched and continuous.