Y4 Friday Blog - 02/05/25
Date: 30th Apr 2025 @ 3:18pm
Welcome to the Year 4 Blog!
Each week you will find out what we have been doing in class, weekly spellings / times tables and lots more.
Homework
Reading - Reading is one of the most important skills for children to master as it unlocks their imagination and allows them to access the rest of the curriculum. Please read with your child every night. Asking questions improves key reading skills, such as retrieval and inference. E.g. "Why do you think the character is unhappy?"
Please note that reading books will be changed when completed. Please write a note in your child's reading record book when a book has been completed and sign the relevant parent signature box. Thank you in advance.
Spellings - Please find this weeks spellings below and a link to spelling frame.
Please note that our spelling quiz will be on Thursday 8th May
Spellings
Geography Fact of the Week!
Mrs. Macdonald (our Geography boffin) has had a great idea! To make sure our knowledge of the world is solid, each class will be spotlighting a different country in Europe.
For this term, we have the country Iceland (perfect, as it links with our new English unit and history topic!)
Each week, we will find and share a new fact on the blog...
Iceland Is One of the Most Sparsely Populated Countries on Earth
One of the reasons for Iceland’s beauty is that it’s relatively untouched by human interference. Much of this country is not ideal for human settlement: The glacier Vatnajökull covers about 8% of the country’s landmass, for instance. And we wouldn’t recommend building a house at the foot of an active volcano!
Consequently, Iceland has an average of about 4 people per km2 (10 people per mi2). Like many sparsely populated countries, most Icelanders reside in cities: Reykjavik houses roughly 1/3 of the country’s population. Iceland’s population is about 390,000 people, compare that to the 68,000,000 that live in the UK!
Maths Problem of the Week
Each week, a new maths problem will appear on the blog... Can you solve it?
The answers will be posted in next week's blog!
Previous week's answers...
If A-B is 15cm, then B-C must be 7.5cm
Adding these together means A-C = 22.5cm
Our learning this week in Year 4
English
What is a folktale?
A traditional story that people of a particular region or group repeat among themselves.
Despite having never been to Scotland, many of Y4 knew the famous folktale of The Loch Ness Monster, a story which has been told for over 1000 years. This opened up the idea of looking at a variety of different tales. One particular tale which caught our attention was titled, 'Now I Should Laugh' , a story where 3 sisters have to play practical jokes on their husband in order to claim their inheritance. It involved a bad singer, a coffin, and someone naked at the front of the church! How strange!
Maths
In Maths, we have moved onto our second section of Place Value, understanding how to compare and order numbers with up to 2 decimal places. Again, as our place value knowledge is so secure, it was a piece of cake! At first, we simply looked at numbers of the same length - e.g. 7.35 and 3.57
We then had to compare numbers which were the same amount of digits, but with different place value amounts - e.g. 9.391 and 10.28. For this, we had to look at the correct column, ensuring we compared the tens column in each number.
PE
Carrying on with our OAA topic, focusing on orienteering, we continued with our directional language. We made our courses more complex, adding in some mathematical cross-curricular links and langauge (turn 90 degree clockwise)
To finish the lesson, and really stretch our brains, we used official geography language, telling our partner to turn north east or south west before moving. Some of us even went further, using phrases like north, north west! Wow!
Have a fantastic weekend!
The Year 4 team