Topic Summary
The children will learn a range of knowledge to help them answer the question 'How do our surroundings affect our lives?'
In this term we will compare our locality with that of other places in the world specifically looking at rivers. We will be naming and locating rivers in the UK and comparing the River Tyne with the River Nile. We will also be looking at the effect of flooding and dams and the effects of erosion.
In science we will be focusing on sound. Children will study the ear in detail, learning how sound reaches the ear and how the different parts of the ear allow us to hear sounds. We will explore how sound is produced and investigate the different ways objects vibrate to produce sounds, including musical instruments, radios, mobile phones and animals.
We will be coding in computing and using our skills from last term on microbits in our woodwork project in DT.
In the topic we will be teaching the children the following key concepts:
- Comparison – – How do our lives differ depending on our location.
- Necessity – What factors are essential to our everyday lives?
- Beauty - What makes something beautiful and how is this interpreted by different people.
- Tradition - How do traditions change according to time and place?
Visits / Trips
- GEM education delivering a workshop on microbits.
- 7th March - Trip to the Great North Museum
- 21st March - Trip to the theatre to watch Horrible Histories.
Subject Information
English
This term we will look at the following texts and stimulus:
- Letters to Mercy School in Kenya
- Song of the River
- River Poetry
- Hugo
In guided reading we will be reading The Wild Robot; the heartwarming and action-packed illustrated novel exploring what happens when nature and technology collide.
We will be reinforcing our letter writing skills by writing letters to Mercy School in Africa. We will be looking at the features of playscripts and having a go at writing our own. We will also be exploring descriptive and creative language by writing poems about rivers based on our work in geography. At the end of the term we will use our skills of inference to explore characters.
Throughout our writing this half term we will be consolidating our use of fronted adverbials and conjunctions as well as expanding our use of word classes to include prepositions and determiners.
Maths
In maths, we will be focusing on fractions and decimals using the following skills:
- Find and compare mixed number fractions and improper fractions.
- Know equivalent fractions and begin to find fractions of amounts.
- Add and subtract different fractions.
- Understand the decimals tenths and hundredths. We will try to understand how these relate to place value and fractions.
Science
This term we will be exploring sound. Children study the ear in detail, learning how sound reaches the ear and how the different parts of the ear allow us to hear sounds. We will explore how sound is produced and investigate the different ways objects vibrate to produce sounds, including musical instruments, radios, mobile phones and animals. We will learn how decimals (dB) are used to measure the intensity and loudness of sound and plan, investigate and evaluate our very own volume experiment.
Geography
Our topic this term will be about rivers. We will be naming and locating rivers in the UK and comparing the River Tyne with the River Nile. We will also be looking at the effect of flooding and dams and the effects of erosion. We will finish the topic by looking at how we use a river. As part of this topic we will be consolidating our map work by using grid references and ordinance survey maps.
RE
In RE children will be learning about the ‘The person of Jesus.’ They will learn about the people that Jesus associated with and what this teaches us about his character. We will also look at life and death of Jesus and the meaning and significance of these events and what the festival of Easter means to Christians.
Design Technology
This term we will discover woodwork! We will practising the skills of sawing, joining, sanding and decorating and use these to design and make a robot.
Computing
In our Computing lessons we will focus on coding. This will involve following instructions, using algorithms to navigate each other around a space. We will eventually get to programme our Beebots to follow paths.
If you would like any further details about this half term's curriculum in Year 4, please speak to your child's teacher.