Good afternoon everyone,

I hope you’ve all had a lovely week, even if the weather didn’t quite get the memo that it’s meant to be spring soon! We’re well underway into the first spring term now and it’s been another busy one in Year 4.

In maths, we’ve been focusing on multiplication and division facts and, importantly, how the two link together. The children have been learning that multiplication and division are inverse operations and how knowing one fact can help you work out another. We also spent time looking at multiplying and dividing by 10 and 100, using place value to understand what happens to the digits. Rather than just learning a rule, the children practised explaining why the numbers change, which really helped build their understanding.

In English, we reached the end of Winter’s Child and the children have been learning how to write and punctuate direct speech between characters. They’ve worked hard on using inverted commas correctly and making their dialogue clear and effective. Today, we started planning our own follow-on story called Spring’s Child, which we’ll be writing over the next week. There are already some lovely ideas taking shape!

In PE, the children began their swimming lessons at the local leisure centre. They had lots of fun and were very relieved to report that “the water was actually really warm!”, which is always a win in January. They were enthusiastic and did a great job during their first session.

In art, we started our new topic Painting and Mixed Media: Light and Dark. The children looked closely at different painting techniques, comparing artists’ work and thinking about colour and texture. They also practised mixing colours to create tints and shades, experimenting with how light and dark effects can change the mood of a piece of artwork.

In science, we kicked off our new topic on States of Matter. The children learned what solids and liquids are and sorted different materials into groups based on their state. We talked about tricky examples that don't seem to fit at first, such as pourable solids like rice and sand, and discussed how these behave. We’ll be exploring this topic further over the next few weeks, including some fun investigations.

Thank you, as always, for your support. Have a lovely weekend!