English

This term we have been looking at the story The Tin Forest about a man who wishes he lived in a jungle. We talked about how the old man in the story felt at different points and wrote diary entries from his point of view. We also looked closely at the language in the story and created performances to understand it better. Using different materials, we created our own tin forests. After reading more of our story we found out that real animals and plants had started to make a home in the old man’s tin forest. Using different coloured card, we have included the real animals and plants in our tin forests too.

Maths

For maths we have been focusing on place value including thousands, hundreds, tens and ones. We looked at ordering numbers and rounding them to help us estimate answers. We then looked a lot at column addition and when we needed to rename to add. For the last week, we have been learning how to use different mental methods to add large numbers in our heads and using TTRockstars and other games to practice our times tables.

Art

For art we have been looking at shading to help us with observational drawings. We started by looking at how to use observation to create a line drawing of a leaf, we then learnt how to add shading to our drawings to represent light and dark colours. Finally, we transferred our shading skills to colour to make our drawings look more realistic.

History

Year 4 have had a lot of fun this term looking at the Romans in Britain. We started with when the Romans first invaded, how they had to defeat the Celt leader Boudicca and what changes they made to Britain while they were here. We even got to look at what a gladiator was and why gladiator fights were so important and popular for the Roman people. We finished our enquiry with a trip to Ribchester Roman Museum to look at the Roman fort that used to be there and explore Roman artefacts and armour.

PE

For PE we have been looking at our throwing and catching skills using different equipment. We have then thought about how we could make our tasks more difficult to help improve our skills. We have also been lucky enough to have a coach come in to help us improve our athletic skills, focusing mainly on different types of throws and our running technique.

PSHCE

This term our PSHCE focus was on Being Me in My World. We looked at how to work effectively as a team and roles we and others play in school. We also talked about what rules we wanted to have in our classroom and created our Class Charter. Finally we looked at what make a good team and used these skills in some team building activities.

RE

In RE we looked at the question ‘Is it possible for everyone to be happy?’. We talked about what makes ourselves and others happy and what can cause us to be unhappy. We then looked at the story of the Buddha and what he taught about happiness and what happiness means to Buddhists today. Finally, we made a happiness box. Around it we wrote what we and Buddhists think about happiness. Inside our box we then wrote a way we could make others happy.

Science

During science this term we have looked at states of matter. We started by looking at what the 3 states of matter are and their properties. We then looked at how these states of matter can be changed and performed different experiments to observe these changes including looking at what the best temperature for melting chocolate is. We also looked at the water cycle and why it rains and created our own mini water cycles.

Music

For our Harvest Celebration at St. Catherine’s led by Father Roger Parker, Hogwarts have been hard at work learning two harvest songs: – Cauliflowers Fluffy and Harvest Samba. We also had the pleasure of hearing our Year 5 class performing the hymn We Plough the Fields and Scatter.

Miss Whiteside, Music Lead, has led our weekly singing assembly in readiness for our celebration.

With Mrs. Lingard we have ‘been around the world’ listening to music. We enjoyed samples of Samba music from Brazil, (like our Harvest Samba), Fado style of melancholic from Portugal, African American Music from the USA and then learnt about how China uses the pentatonic scale, whereas the western world uses an eight-note scale. We had fun playing the classroom glockenspiels using the five pentatonic notes – C, D, E, G, A

In singing lessons with Mr Garrett, the pupils have been taught the importance of warming up their voice and the importance of good posture. Areas covered in the warm ups included breathing, diction, vowel shape, intonation, dynamics, phrasing, and expression. The pupils enjoyed the warm ups and were keen to engage in practical work.

As well as singing, pupils were taught to listen actively and use appropriate subject specific language when they discussed music that they had listened to in lessons. They were gradually introduced to the elements of music and through the activities of listening and performing were able to develop a deeper knowledge of how music is put together.

Singing:

This term pupils have learned the following songs for the harvest festival:

Harvest Samba and Cauliflowers fluffy.

In addition, pupils worked through the Charanga original scheme with their singing and this term the song they worked on and performed was Mamma Mia

All pupils have done a singing assessment.

Keyboards:

After a lot of initial singing this term, we started with a refresher keyboard course. All pupils also had an initial assessment.

Keyboard piece: Trance D