Round Diamond
Primary School
Year 4
2021-2022
Year 4 Team 2021-2022:
O'Keeffe Class Teacher: Mrs Downie
Picasso Class Teacher: Miss Bone
Lodge Class Teacher: Mrs Herbert
Welcome to Year 4!
Spring 1
Welcome to our Year 4 class page! We hope you have had a wonderful Christmas break and are looking forward to beginning the new school term in Year 4.
This term, our PE day will be a MONDAY. Please make sure appropriate PE kit is in school every day.
We are using 'Go Read' to log the children's reading books. The children have been shown where to go to change their reading books independently and we will encourage them to change their books as soon as they have finished reading them. The children will also receive a library book to read alongside their shelf book. Library books are changed once a week.
We are so excited for all of the learning opportunities we will get to share with the children this year. Below is some information on the learning we will be carrying out this half term.
In English, we will be exploring setting descriptions, focusing on the book 'Cloud Tea Monkeys'. Later in the half term, we will be focusing on persuasive writing.
In Maths, we will be exploring number and place value, addition and subtraction and multiplication and division in a range of fluency, problem solving and reasoning contexts. Please see below for this term's fluency facts and encourage your child to keep practising these, along with the rest of their times tables.
In Science, we will be looking at living things and their habitats. This will involve sorting living things by different criteria and using classification keys.
In History, we will continue our learning on Early Britain, moving on to looking at the Bronze Age.
In Geography, we will be looking at the geographical features of the Alps.
Please refer back to our class pages each week to see what the children have been getting up to in school!
Curriculum Documents
w/c 17th January 2022
In English, we have been writing setting descriptions based on our book 'Cloud Tea Monkeys'. We worked together to edit and improve our learning, making sure our vocabulary choices were ambitious and that our writing was grammatically accurate.
w/c 10th January 2022
In maths this week, we have been learning about Roman numerals. We learnt how to write numbers with up to 4 digits.
Have a go at this game to revise what you learnt.
w/c 3rd January 2022
Cross Curricular Days
On Thursday and Friday, our Spring Term learning commenced with our termly cross-curricular days. This time, they focused on life skills. In Year 4, we took part in a range of practical activities to enhance our learning in this area:
First aid - we learnt how to contact the emergency services for a range of scenarios. Some of us also looked at the recovery position.
Gardening - we learnt about the advantages of growing our own vegetables and successful planted our own seeds - we are looking forward to watching them grow!
Recycling - we looked for symbols on a range of containers and learnt how to sort our rubbish at home.
Making drinks - we learnt how to make tea, coffee and squash and wrote our own clear instructions.
Tying shoe laces - we made our own cardboard shoes to practise threading and tying our laces.
Table manners - we learnt how to correctly hold a knife and fork and how to act politely when at the table enjoying a meal.
w/c 15th November 2021
This half term, we have changed from Art to D&T lessons. Our focus this half term is sewing skills and we will be using these to make our own Christmas decorations.
To begin this topic, we practised our running, back and over stitches which we will use in our final product.
We had some excellent sewers in both classes!
w/c 8th November 2021
In our RE lessons this term, we have been learning about ways of worship in Hinduism, Christianity and Sikhism. Last week we explored key festivals, so this week we looked at Diwali in more detail and learned all about rangoli. We looked at what rangoli patterns are, why they are used and what they can be made from. The children then used coloured rice to create their own patterns.
w/c 1st November 2021
This week, we had 2 cross curricular days which focused on learning about Parliament.
We practised writing a letter to our local MP on an issue that was important to us, watched a Youth Parliament debate, chose a debate topic for our class debate, made campaign posters and ballot slips, learned about the 4 main political parties and voted for our favourite party, wrote our debate speeches and then held our class debates and votes!
w/c 18th October 2021
We have just started our new RHSE topic of "A World Without Judgement". In our previous lesson, we spoke about how different groups of people are judged, how we are judged positively and negatively and how we can judge others too. This week, we were proud to be able to share with a group of Year 5 children how we ensure that everyone has equal opportunities to learn at Round Diamond. Ansh collected the children from their classrooms and took them to see how he accesses his learning and some resources we have used on our most recent displays! The Year 5 children then returned to their classes and spoke about what they had learned from Ansh.
w/c 11th October 2021
This week in History, we imagined we were Stone Age children! We used our new knowledge from the past few weeks on what people in the Stone Age ate, how they hunted and what they wore to write a diary entry describing a day in the life of a Stone Age child.
w/c 4th October 2021
In our Computing lessons so far this term, we have learned about staying safe online and the differences between networks and devices. This week, we learned about the differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web! The children created tables on Google Classroom to present their new knowledge.
w/c 27th September 2021
This term in Science we have been learning about sound. In this week's lesson we made our own panpipes out of straws and played them, practising with making high and low pitches. We noticed that the shorter straws made higher pitch sounds than the longer straws!
w/c 20th September 2021
This week in our English learning we discussed the effectiveness of vocabulary. We explored new adjectives like malevolent and vindictive, and in groups, ranked these in order of their effectiveness when describing Captain Hook.
As a class, we agreed that malevolent was one of the most effective words as it isn't used a lot so helps to show a lot of emotion. Some children thought that mean and unkind were the least effective words as they are not as powerful, and the children have been using them for a few years now.
The Year 4 teachers are looking forward to seeing some of this new vocabulary in the children's learning soon!
w/c 13th September 2021
We started learning about sound by exploring how we hear. We learned all about the different parts of the ear, what the purpose of each part is and finally, how we actually hear the sound - by little, tiny hairs sending signals to the brain that we are hearing a sound! Both classes then presented their understanding of the process to the rest of their class, including information we had gathered the previous week.
w/c 6th September 2021
In Art this half term we will be painting our own landscapes. To begin this topic, we spent this week's Art lesson exploring a range of brushes. We chose appropriate brushes to create different strokes and varied textures!
w/c 30th August 2021
This week, the Year 4 teachers welcomed all the children back to school. The children learned about their class artists (Georgia O'Keeffe and Pablo Picasso) as well as writing about their summer holidays, practising spelling and playing times tables games to engage everyone in this year's learning.
We are looking forward to sharing more Year 4 learning with you soon!
2020-2021
Teaching Team
Mrs Herbert (Picasso class)
Miss Blundell (O'Keeffe class) with Miss McLintock (student teacher)
Mrs Herbert ( Target group teacher)
Mrs Mason ( Teaching Assistant)
Class information
Year four PE lessons will be on Thursday afternoons.
Home learning
Home learning tasks (spellings, my maths and maths fluency) will be set on a Friday. We encourage children to read daily and this can be recorded in their reading records.
Year 3/4 Statutory Spellings:
In the link below, you will find the National Curriculum Year 3/4 Statutory Spelling List document. On page 16 of the document, you will find the Year 3/4 spelling list. The previous pages of the documents also explain the spellings rules that we teach in our weekly spelling practise. Each week, alongside a spelling rule, we send home two statutory spellings from the list to keep children practising them regularly.
Children are assessed on all the words from the list each term, throughout the years. The document also contains the Year 5/6 Statutory Spelling List and rules which children will move onto next year.
05.07.21
In our maths learning this week, we have been building our confidence with time. In Miss Blundell's class we did one of her favourite time activities, MUSICAL CLOCKS! We danced around the room to the music and then when it stopped we had to read the time off an analogue clock. Year 4 also explored 12- and 24-hour conversion later on in the week and they should be really proud of themselves, as this is challenging learning.
28.01.21
We hope everyone has recovered after the excitement of the school sleepover. We wanted to say a little message to thank the children for some of the lovely manners we saw when we were handing out food and drinks, and the general appreciation from some children for the experience.
It was definitely an early night for the teachers on Saturday!
21.07.21
In this lesson, we made pulleys. We use string, a little plastic pot, a magnet and a paperclip. We attached the pulley to the chair and attempted to pull the paperclip up with the magnet attached to the bottom of the pot. This skill will be useful to help us when we go start our DT project of making a ski lift.
14.06.21
Cross Curricular Days for PE!
We have had some fun days this week linking our lessons to PE. On Monday, we practised some first aid and we learnt and tried bandaging each other. We then went onto explore the history of the Ancient Olympics. In the afternoon, we did our learning outside. There was various different food and drink packaging around the playground and we went on a scavengers hunt to find food with certain contents. Some of the things we had to find included:
- A product that contains no fats
- A food high in sugar
- A food containing around 10g of protein per 100g
- A food that has an amber salt label
07.06.21
We started our new D&T unit this week where we are developing skills to move towards creating a ski lift. This week we looked at various pulleys and how they work. We learnt some important vocabulary including axle, wheel, force and motor. We then explained the process ourselves so that we are reading to make our own pulleys in our next D&T lesson.
24.06.21
This week we enjoyed a lovely art morning. Firstly, we did a contrasting sketch of the Stonehenge. On one part of the page we used charcoal and the other half we used sketching pencils and colouring pencils. Our focus was to create the appropriate textures on the stone structure and also to use tones to show where the light hits the stone from the sun.
We then evaluated our previously made Stonehenge structures. We considered the strength of our design and the areas that needed improvement. We thought about the skills we could use next time to achieve better results.
17.05.21
In maths, we have been spending some time building our confidence with our times tables. Miss Brooks group practised with games such as pairs, around the world and finding patterns on a 100 square. We started to feel more confident with our 3 and 4 times tables.
10.05.21
During out art learning journey, we have explored the different textures of materials you would find at the Stonehenge. We used sketches (we had drawn in a previous lesson) to collaboratively create a model of this structure. We used various tools to mould our clay and show the different textures. We had to consider how we could ensure our structure would remain stable.
03.05.21
During our art learning, we created scaled up versions of our Stonehenge sketches. We used our learning from maths to make the measures of a sketches ten times bigger. We then used chalk to sketch them out on the playground.
26.04.21 - We had two fantastic cross curricular days!
19.04.21
This week in science we began our new unit on states of matter. We sorted different materials into either solids, liquids or gasses. We then considered what properties they would have if they were in these groups. We discussed the particle formation of these materials and demonstrated how the particles would look in groups.
22.03.21
15.03.21
This week we started our playscripts unit. We practised reading Alice in Wonderland as if we were characters performing. We had to consider our tone and intonation when reading to ensure we were expressing the correct emotions.
08.03.21
For our maths learning we created human grids and plotted shapes. We discussed the various polygons that we created on the grids and their properties. We also completed shapes by identifying what the missing coordinates were.
01.03.21
This week we read various blurbs of different genres of texts, including playscripts. We then used our VIPERS skill of prediction to make sensible predictions of these blurbs and justified our views. We recorded our ideas on post it notes and placed them on the covers. This allowed us to share a good discussion at the end of the lesson and compare our thoughts.
22.02.21
This week we started our new unit in D&T all about food technology. It will lead onto the children using skills such as chopping, slicing, grating and peeling and then planning their own soup.
For this lesson we explored how food is sourced and we conducted research and presented our finding in a leaflet.
08.02.21
01.02.21 - Mental Health Awareness Week
We are all going through a challenging time in lockdown, so it is more important than ever to ensure we are staying happy and healthy.
Do you remember our "Take Notice" assemblies last term? Taking notice of the world around you and what you are grateful for is one way that you can improve your happiness every day.
There are so many benefits to practicing mindfulness, you can feel happier, less stressed or anxious, calmer, more focused, be kinder and even sleep better!
Explore this link - hopefully it will keep you healthy, happy and have a little fun along the way!
Please check with an adult that they are happy for you to access this.
25.01.21 - A holiday to the French Alps would be nice right now, wouldn't it?
This week the children used their English learning of persuasive writing and their Geography learning all about the French Alps to create a holiday brochure.
This week year 4 created some powerful descriptions of a rainforest.
We enjoyed our last week before Christmas. Here's little Christmas message from us in Year 4 at Round Diamond.
Merry Christmas from Picasso
Merry Christmas from Mrs Herbert's English group
Merry Christmas from O'Keeffe
7.12.20
In our assembly this week we practised using Makaton to sing a Christmas song.
Makaton.wmv
30.11.20 - Sewing in Year 4
23.11.20 - Maths - Coordinates battleships game
Some children wanted the sheet to play more battleships at home.
16.11.20
Year 4 had great fun this week in science! Miss McLintock and Miss Blundell demonstrated the human digestive system with some biscuits, a banana, orange juice, a sandwich bag and a pair of tights.
After that, the children went outside and we had a cross-curricular link to PE. Mr Beeson had set up a fantastic circuit of exercise for the children to carry out which represented different parts of the digestive system.
11.11.20 - 3d shapes in maths
5.11.20
19.10.20
12.10.20
05.10.20
28.09.20
21.09.20
14.09.20
07.09.20
Picasso welcome video.wmv
Welcome to O'Keeffe
Goodbye to our lovely year four cohort!
You have made us very proud this year with all your achievements and the maturity you have shown with how this year has turned out.
Have a well deserved summer break and we wish you all the best for your year 5 experience.
Miss Blundell, Miss Mitchell, Mrs Herbert and Mr Haig
2019 - 2020
Home learning week commencing 20.07.20
Resources
Home learning week commencing 13.07.20
English Summer 2 Week 7
Maths Summer 2 Week 7
History
Science
RE
DT
French
French Listening assessment .mov
Computing
Home learning week commencing 06.07.20
English Summer 2 Week 6
Maths Summer 2 Week 6
Geography
History
Science
RE
DT
French
Computing
Home learning week commencing 29.06.20
English Summer 2 Week 5
Maths Summer 2 Week 5
Geography
History
Science
RE
DT
French
Computing
Home learning week commencing 22.06.20
English Summer 2 Week 4
Maths Summer 2 Week 4
Geography
History
History MEDIUM/HOT
History task 2 demo.mov
RE
Science
DT
French
French
Computing
Home learning week commencing 15.06.20
English Summer 2 Week 3
English 1
For learning your spellings this week you could...
- Write them in melted chocolate or shavingfoam
- Write them on a family members back using your finger
- Create a rap using as many of them as you can
- Write silly sentences with them in
Maths Summer 2 Week 3
Steps and what it looks like (rounding to estimate and using the inverse to check)
Geography
History
RE
Science
French
English 1
For your spellings you could do the following activities...
- Write them in sentences
- Rainbow writing
- Pyramid writing
English 2
English 3
English 4
Maths 1
Maths 2
Maths 3
Maths 4
Geography
History
Science
RE
DT
French
Computing
English 1
English 2
English 3
English 4
Maths 1
Maths 2
Maths 3
Maths 4
Geography
History
Music
Science
R.E
Diversity posters
DT
Computing
Half term activities
Message to Year 4
Recommended Texts
Hi Year 4,
We had a few requests for book recommendations during our phone calls so we have compiled a list of ones we love! There is a range of levels here as we know you are all on different book bands.
Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth by Oliver Jeffers
The Lorax by Dr Seuss
The Day the Crayons Quit By Drew Daywalt
Slime by David Walliams
The Peski Kids by R.A Spratt
Percy Jackson By Rick Riordan
The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi
Home Learning overview
English 1
English 3
English 4
English 5
Maths 1
Maths 2
Maths 3
Maths 4
Geography
Music
History
R.E
Art
French
English 1
English 2
English 3
English 4
Maths 1
Maths 2
Maths 3
Maths 4
Geography
Music
History
Science
French
Weekly overview
English 1
English 2
English 3
English 4
Maths 1
Rainbow fractions
Maths 2
Maths 3
Maths 4
Geography
History
Science
Music
Week 1.MP4
R.E
Art - A Street Through Time
Week 2 Overview 27.04.20
English 1
English 3
English 4
English 5
Parallel ascenders
Maths 1
Maths 2
Reminder about rounding rules
Maths 3
Maths 4
Geography
History
Science
Art
Miss Mitchell chose to do a dragon for her St. George inspired piece!
R.E
French
Home Learning overview Year 4 WB 20.04.20
English 1
English 3
English 4
English 5
Maths 1
Maths 2
The grid method demo.mov
Bus stop method demo.mov
Maths 3
Maths 4
Example of rainbow factor pairs.mov
Maths 5
Geography
History
Art
Science
R.E
13.04.20
Hi Year 4,
This is just an idea for your second week of Easter holidays if you are looking for something to do. In The Spiderwick Chronicles, a family encounter a world of creatures around their new home and find a field guide, detailing all the ones Arthur Spiderwick has found. This links to what we were doing in Science before Easter (Living things, classification and keys). If you want to, you could create your own field guide of imaginary creatures that may be living in your house, garden or even the darker creatures in a shed! This is not a compulsory task, just a fun activity that links a lot of learning. Remember, when creating your creatures you have to think about what kind of habitat, diet and characteristics they have. Below are some examples of a field guide and the audio book for the first novel in the series.
Have fun explorers!
What children have done in Easter
03.04.2020
Hi Year 4,
We hope you are all keeping well and have enjoyed the last two weeks of learning. We will not be setting any new learning over the Easter holidays but have found a wide range of activities you can do while you are at home over the next few weeks - 65 fun things to be precise! We wish you a happy, fun Easter break and hope to see you all soon!
The Year 4 Team
65 things to do at home
Crafts and activities
19.03.20
Hello Year 4 parents,
Due to the upcoming school closure on Friday 20th March, we will now be providing learning through the website. This will be learning for the children to complete over the next two weeks at home. We recommend children continue in a daily routine to ensure a sense of stability and to allow them to continue to progress in their learning.
Below we have structured a two week time table which will allow children time to practise their maths fluency, spelling, reading, creative writing and topical learning.
If you have any questions regarding this learning please email rpaice@rounddiamond.herts.sch.uk
Keep safe and healthy & we will see you all soon.
The Year 4 team
As well as our learning below, Twinkl have offered free resources for the next two weeks.
https://www.twinkl.co.uk/offer
The code is: PARENTSTWINKLHELPS
Year 4 Timetable Week beginning 23.03.20
Monday Resources
Tuesday resources
When writing your setting descriptions, you may find the following website useful for inspiration or for settings to describe.
https://www.literacyshed.com/
Wednesday resources
Thursday resources
Friday Resources
Please see Monday's timestables activity.
Year 4 Week 2 Week beginning 30.03.20
Monday resources
Tuesday resources
Please refer to Wednesday from week 1 for spelling practise
Thursday resources
Friday resources
10.03.20
We braved the cold in maths this week and went out to create human grids to plot different coordinates.
We then created a range of different polygons on these grids.
09.03.20
Year 4 spent their science lesson hunting the playground for invertebrates!
We carefully searched in different microhabitats to see what we could find. The children did observational sketches and described the microhabitat the living things were found in. When we got back into the classroom, we tried to classify some of the invertebrates and we identified that we had found annelids, insects and arachnids.
Year 4 have had a fantastic week full of Alice in Wonderland learning. Today, Miss Blundell's English group wrote their own birthday poems inspired by 'A Very Merry Unbirthday" from the animated film's tea party scene. We went on to have our own little tea party with some yummy biscuits!
P3060593.AVI
25.02.20
Computing has been really enjoyable over this term as the year 4 children have had great fun creating their comic strips!
The children have shown a great progression of skills over the year so far. They started off in Autumn developing their understanding of editing fonts and formatting images. This has now allowed them to insert images onto publisher and edit the sizes of these images to suit their comic strips. They have then used their knowledge of editing fonts sizes when writing a range of speech bubbles and thought bubbles.
Have a look at some brilliant examples:
COMPUTING COMIC STRIPS
In Science, we have been learning all about the different endangered species in the world and how humans contribute to the declining amount of certain species.
We researched in the poison dart frog and then wrote a non-chronological report on this particular animal. This week, we created a charity advertisement to share our knowledge from across this unit.
Micah and Kevwe's charity advertisement
07.02.20
Geography
Cross-curricular link to computing
In Geography this week, we compared the French Alps with our local area. We then went on to create documentaries based on this topic. We used the ipads to record different scenes.
27.01.20
Computing FUN!
This week we planned storyboards for our comic strips we are planning to create in computing.
We went on to take pictures which we will go on to insert into publisher.
24.01.20 - History
During our science learning this week we researched into a range of habitats and the species that live there. We found out about certain adaptations of species which allow them to survive in certain circumstances.
13.01.20
In PSHE, Year 4 have been thinking about the different ways of being healthy.
We had fantastic discussion about certain things we should always be doing to keep healthy, certain things we should have here and there as a treat and the things we should avoid!
We went on the talk about the different food groups and why they are important in their own way.
08.01.19 Happy new year! Year four had a fantastic RE lesson today and learnt all about the founder of our new focus religion, Sikhism.
They retold the story through drama performances.
20.12.20 Eggciting experiments!
13.12.19 Can you solve the winter riddle?
6.12.19
29.11.19 - Common Exception Words to Practise
22.11.19
O'Keeffe wowed Miss Blundell with their excellent behaviour and improvement with their steel pans playing.
Tuesday Steel Pans
15.11.19
This week in English the children read aloud to build on their fluency and intonation.
LOOK AWAY IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH! This half term year 4 are learning all about the digestive system. In this week's science lesson the children watched the teachers demonstrate what it would look like for food to travel through the different digestive organs. After the demonstration, the children then went outside and we had a cross-curricular link with PE as the children carried out a circuit that represented different parts of digestion.
Year 4 had a fantastic day on Wednesday when Tim and Bridget came in to carry out our Egyptian Drumming and Dancing Workshop. A huge thank you to all the adults who joined us for our Year 4 open afternoon. It was lovely to see you interacting with your children and having a dance yourselves!
24.10.19
Here are a range of games that can be played at home to help children with their times tables.
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button
https://www.timestables.co.uk/speed-test/
There are also good songs on Youtube where popular chart music has been adapted by an Australian teacher into times table songs. This is the link to his page:
24.10.19
Year 4 have been exploring shape over the past few weeks. They carried out lots of activities such as classifying 2d shapes and making their own 3d shapes with play dough!
11.10.19 - 18.10.19
Over the past couple of weeks we have been making canopic jars. We moulded the jar lids with modroc and then painted them using typical Egyptian colours.
30.09.2019
In year 4, we created our own panpipes. We had to carefully follow instructions to ensure our panpipes worked. Whilst we were making them, we were considering how we would be able to make them create different pitches.
23.9.20
In PSHE, we discussed different emotions we feel. The children draw the expression you might show when feeling this emotion and added a the name of that emotion.
20.09.19 Mummification in Year 4!
A great start to our new science unit!
This week to introduce our science unit of 'Sound' we did a sound survey of the school. We stopped in a range of different places around the school and listened carefully to what we could hear. We considered what caused the vibration the made the sound travel to our ears.
E-Safety in Year 4!
16.07.19
02.07.19
13.06.19
06.06.19
22.05.19
17.05.19
02.05.19
26.04.19
05.04.19
04.04.19
13.03.19
A few children have asked for the website address of the site we are using in computing so here it is;
http://isleoftune.com/