Meerkats class teacher: Miss Howsam
Teaching assistant: Mrs Lander

Welcome to Year 4 – Autumn 1 Learning Journey 🍂

We are excited to kick off an engaging and exciting first half-term in Year 4! Here's a glimpse into what your child will be learning this half term:

Curriculum Overview

English ✍️📖
We will be focusing on the books 'Gorilla' and 'Greek Myths'. Our focus skills are to expand noun phrases by the addition of modifying adjectives, nouns and prepositional phrases, organise paragraphs around a theme (to organise and sequence more extended narrative structures), choose nouns or pronouns appropriately for clarity and cohesion and to avoid repetition and use commas after fronted adverbials.

Maths ➕➖

We start the year recapping our place value knowledge, before moving on to learning written methods linked to the 4 operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). 

Science 🪨🦴

Our first unit is 'Animals including humans' where we look at healthy eating, human teeth and food chains. We then move on to learning about 'Sound' and how it travels through different materials through observations and experiments. 

History 🏺📜

As historians, we will explore the world of ancient Greece and the discoveries they made, and how these discoveries impact our modern world. 

Art 🎨🍎

The focus in these lessons will be creating power prints through different drawing/collage techniques. We will then combine all the skills learnt to create a large group piece together. 

Music 🎶🥁
In music, we will start by focusing on body percussion (Rainforests).

Computing 💻🎞

We will learn to recognise the internet as a network or networks and begin to understand why we should evaluate online content. ️

French 🇫🇷🗣️
In French, we begin by recapping our french phonetics to support us in our focus topics 'presenting myself' and 'my family'.

RE ✝️🌍

We will be firstly learning about the Holy Trinity, and how this links to our own lives. Following this we will begin to learn about Hinduism, learning about what they believe God is like. 

PE 🗺️🏃

For the first half term, we will be learning the ball skills needed to play netball, followed by a gymnastics unit leading up to Christmas. 

PSHE 🧠💬

We will start our learning by focusing on family and our relationships, before moving on to learn how to look after our wellbeing and physical health as we grow older. 

Additional Information for Parents ℹ️👪

🏃‍♂️ PE – Every Thursday
Please send your child to school with their full PE kit every Thursday.
PE Kit includes:

• White t-shirt
• Black shorts/leggings/tracksuit bottoms
• Appropriate footwear (trainers)
  
  Important: No earrings are allowed during PE sessions. Children must be able to remove them independently as staff cannot assist and tape is no longer permitted. Children unable to remove their earrings will not be able to take part. Long hair must be tied up for all lessons.

🏊 Swimming Meerkats will begin swimming in Autumn 2, so no need to worry about kit just yet!

🌳 For Meerkats, Forest School will take place in Spring 2, so no need to worry about this yet either.

Reminders 📝

• 🧴 Water Bottles: Please ensure your child has a named water bottle in school every day.
• 🧥 Label Everything: Label all clothing so that lost items can be returned promptly.

We’re very much looking forward to the year ahead and can’t wait to continue our learning journey in Year 4! 🌟