Our year so far...

We had a busy and exciting autumn term. In September, we introduced our topic of ‘The Impact of the Roman Invasion on Britain’ through a Roman Day where we welcomed a Roman soldier to our school. During the topic, we visited Colchester Castle where we were particularly interested in learning about a local female Celtic queen, Boudicca, who successfully beat the Romans in several large battles. On our return, we wrote newspaper articles about her famous victory at Colchester. In our first year 4 assembly, we shared some of our learning and work. In D.T. we designed and built Roman catapults which involved developing woodwork skills. At the end of the topic, the children worked in small groups to present an aspect of their learning to the rest of the class in a variety of ways including through drama, posters and power points. They particularly thought about the oracy skills needed for presentational talk.

Our new topic is entitled ‘What Makes the Earth Angry?’. In our Talking Assemblies, we have already discussed some human created disasters, including plastic pollution and climate change. For our topic, we will be focusing on natural disasters, including earthquakes and flooding. Having watched a volcanic eruption in the playground, we began learning about volcanoes. We wrote poems and represented an eruption through dance. Thank you to all the parents who attended the Tea Afternoon and helped their child make a volcanic fortune teller. Following on from this, we investigated what happened in Pompeii nearly 2000 years ago which we used as a stimulus for diary writing in Literacy. Since Christmas, we have learnt about the features of explanation texts and written 2 of our own linking it to science and our learning about the Water Cycle. After learning about tornados, we are now focusing on floods which will include learning about the Felixstowe floods in 1953. We will be working towards performing our own newsflashes. We are very lucky to have some representatives from the Environment Agency coming to work with year 4 on Wednesday 26th February to talk to us about flood defences in our local area.

In science, we have learnt about ‘Animals and Humans’ including skeletons. We learnt about the complex process of the digestive system through a fun experiment. We have just finished learning about ‘States of Matter’ where we explored solids, liquids and gases through a variety of exciting experiments. Now we are moving on to exploring electricity.
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Thank you to all those parents who have been supporting their children to learn their times tables through TTRS. Knowing times tables for quick recall will support your child’s learning throughout their education.