Year 4 - Ratio, levers and persuasion

Year 4 have come back after half term with curiosity at the forefront of their minds. After spending time focusing on ‘Surprised’ by Henri Rousseau for Take One Picture, they are ready to delve further into South America and the Amazon Rainforest.

In English, Year 4 created their own story based on the 'Surprised’ painting complete with a front cover and a blurb, the children will now begin writing their own South American folktale.

Rehearsals have also started for our Easter Play ‘The Great Kapok Tree’ which explores the impact of deforestation on the Amazon Rainforest. The children will also explore this impact in English lessons and debate from different viewpoints as well as developing their persuasive writing skills culminating in preparing a persuasive speech.

In Maths, Year 4 decided to create paint charts showing different shades of the key colours used in Rousseau’s ‘Surprised’. This linked in well with learning about ratio and how having one part green mixed with one part yellow produced a different colour to having three parts green and one part yellow, for example. It captured the children’s imaginations and they loved investigating different ratios with paint!

This half term, Year 4 are also learning all about decimals and how they link with fractions. This concept is vital in everyday life as it links with money and other measurements, like weight and length. The children will continue to develop their place value knowledge as part of this topic and use a range of concrete and pictorial resources to aid their learning. Reasoning continues to be an integral part of our lessons to challenge and deepen understanding.

‘Take One Picture’ also wove into MFL with children singing along to a jungle animal song in French. They added appropriate actions as they learned the pronunciation of the jungle animal vocabulary. Be sure to look out for their video at next week’s TOP exhibition

This half term we also will be practising French numbers, days and months in order to combine them into dates. Using songs and other activities, we will also be learning various food vocabulary and saying whether we like the foods or not. We will also be holding our popular annual ‘Francovision’ French song contest!

Rounding off their work on The Living Rainforest, and as part of the Take One Picture project, in D&T Year 4 have been designing and decorating forest-themed tote bags. The children have loved learning how to print on calico using fabric inks and cannot wait to take their bags home after the exhibition! This half term will also see the children continue to investigate levers and create their own rainforest insect moving mechanisms.