Halfway Junior School

Welcome to Year 4

Life in Year 4

Year 4 is all about applying the independence that children have learned during their first year with us. We continue to encourage children to take  pride in their learning, learn to enjoy challenges as well as celebrating individuality. In year 4, children build on their ability to become self-reflective learners; encouraged to develop and improve their own work through using independent strategies and with less reliance on adults for guidance. We spend time working with the children to teach them the importance of resilience in all aspects of life and, as the year progresses, they begin to take more responsibility for their decisions, actions and choices, whilst learning to accept differences of opinions. Children begin to reflect on their own character and how they can develop themselves further along with exploring friendships and social dynamics, particulalry focusing on 'owning actions' and personal safeguarding.

Staff

Mr Oakey - Class Teacher

Miss Lawrey  - Class Teacher

Mr Warren- Teachiung Assistant

Learning in Year 4

English

Reading

In year 4, we continue to encourage active reading strategies where the children think critically about what they have read. They will continue to explore a wide range of texts and text types including poetry, fiction and non-fiction through daily reading lessons. Building on previous knowledge, teaching is directed more towards developing a wider vocabulary and a deeper understanding and enjoyment of stories, poetry, plays and non-fiction.  Children become critical readers, responding and interracting with what they have read to form opinions, learn knew knowledge and demonstrate awareness of characterisation. The children are encouraged to read for pleasure to develop a wider breadth and depth of reading and each term, their reading skills are applied to an engaging book study in both fiction and non-fiction genres.

Writing

In year 4, children begin to develop as writers through a carefully planned teaching sequence. They are taught to enhance the effectiveness of what they write as well as increase their competence as writers, bieginning to choose pharasing and langauege to impact on the reader. . Children build on what they have learnt in year 3, particularly in terms of more varied grammar, vocabulary and narrative structures from which they can draw to express their ideas. Children begin to understand how the formality and vocabulary can imnpact their writing and begin to suggest ways in which writing can be improved to better meet the purpose. Joined handwriting should now be the norm; fluency here should enable effortless quantity, where the focus can be firmly geared towards quality, accuracy and impact.

Maths

A key focus in maths this year is understanding and recognising key mathematical structures within complex and varied problems. Pupils create models and diagrams to support their thinking and learn how to spot patterns and number relationships within their work. As we move towards the national times tables check at the end of the year, we aim to be able to recall quickly times tables facts up to 12 x 12, however, this is beyond memorisation. Having these facts at our fingertips will help us greatly when we move on to work with other ideas, such as fractions and scaling later in the year. In year 4 we will begin to explore a range of ideas in more complicated ways, meeting negative numbers for the first time, working with decimals up to 2 decimal places, and converting between units of measure, including time. Fluency is still a key focus, which includes number relationships and recall, procedural fluency and patterns.

Useful links

BBC Bitesize

Sumdog

Numbots

Online safety advice