Year 4 - Exploring natural disasters

Welcome to Year 4! It has been lovely to see current and new Gateway faces returning for another fantastic year of learning. The children have settled in wonderfully and have shown enthusiasm and excitement in every lesson. There will be many discoveries, eye-opening experiences and lots of fun along the way, so strap yourself in and join us!

Alongside our learning, being in Year 4 brings extra responsibility and ownership of their learning. The children have shown great maturity when discussing their homework timetable and have settled into the routine of changing their own reading books.

Our Topic in Humanities this term is Natural Disasters. So far, we have delved deep under the earth’s crust to explore what is under our feet and discovered that the movement of tectonic plates is responsible for a range of Natural Disasters. Over the coming weeks, we shall be looking in greater depth at these disasters when we create earthquake proof buildings, a tsunami and exploding volcanoes! We shall also take our learning to Farm school where we will be constructing a flood simulation. An exciting and potentially dangerous time lies ahead!

In English, we have been focusing on our topic of Natural Disasters through our book focus ‘Earth - Shattering Events’. This non - fiction book offers children the opportunity to examine, observe and identify a range of natural disasters through diagrams, tip top facts and small passages of text. To develop our enquiry skills we have researched and explored a number of devastating earthquakes and created a fun and engaging explanation text. We focused on captivating the reader through interesting facts and diagrams. Did you know that the biggest earthquake ever recorded took place in Chile in 1960 and hit 9.5 on the Richter Scale!

For the remainder of the Autumn term we will focus on using a range of writing strategies and genres to develop our understanding of key concepts and techniques. Some of the exciting tasks we have lined up are: reading and creating our own tsunami poems, writing a diary entry from an avalanche survivor and writing a Pompeii newspaper article.

In Maths, we are learning all about numbers and place value in a variety of fun and engaging ways. This includes playing Maths board games and representing numbers using a range of physical resources. We have dived into reasoning to challenge ourselves and apply our knowledge to different contexts. Recently, for example, we have been acting as detectives and using sets of mathematical clues to identify mystery numbers.