Year 4 - Living Rainforest

What an exciting start to 2023!

At the start of this week, Year 4 travelled to ‘The Living Rainforest’ in Hampstead Norreys as part of our new topic ‘South America’ in the same week as the painting for ‘Take One Picture’ was revealed: ‘‘Surprised!’ by French artist Henri Rousseau. The children were certainly ‘Surprised!’ and cannot wait to get started on their chosen learning very soon. All will be revealed at our Art Exhibition at the beginning of March.

In English, we have begun the new term by exploring South American stories starting with Mariana and the Merchild:A Folk Tale from Chile. We have used a variety of techniques including personification, onomatopoeia, metaphors and alliteration, to name a few, when describing some of the fabulous pictures from the book. The children will be studying the different features of Folktales before creating a Folktale of their very own!

This month also sees the annual Bellevue Spelling Bee competition where children will be able to compete against other schools in the Bellevue group. Good Luck, everyone!

Can learning about fractions be fun? Of course! Our highlight this week has been the ‘Doughnut Challenge’. We used higher-order thinking and lots of questioning, as well as providing the children with the opportunity to use the knowledge that they have learned so far. Most importantly, they had lots of fun!

We encourage the children to link their Maths learning to real-life situations, such as finding fractions of quantities for recipes. So, our trip to the Living Rainforest allowed Year 4 to use their mental addition and subtraction skills, as well as their knowledge of money and decimals, to find the total price and calculate what their change would be.

Over the next few weeks, we will continue to use a variety of concrete, pictorial and abstract resources, including Smarties and Chewits for our lessons.

In Humanities we used our map and geography skills to find the continent of South America and have studied and grouped physical and human landmarks. The trip to the Living Rainforest really started the topic off well by immersing the children in a world full of squawking, shuffling and humidity. Inside the rainforest, we had specialist guided tours that linked to our Science topic of adaptations. The children discovered how animals and plants have changed over time to adjust and adapt to their surroundings. Our favourite parts of the trip were seeing the different animals such as; Iguanas, Pygmy Marmosets and Bird Eating Spiders.

Again, linking very strongly to the recent trip, in Science we are focusing on Living things and habitats. We have focused on looking at a variety of animals and how they can be sorted into different groups based upon their characteristics. We will be exploring new surroundings such as rainforests and woodlands and discussing their key features such as the climate and natural materials. Our Science topic will expand, excite and encourage the children to delve into new practical situations as well as exploring how animals adapt in order to survive.