Goldfinches WB 13.9.21

Date: 9th Sep 2021 @ 6:19pm

Welcome to Goldfinches’ Weekly Blog

The first blog for our wonderful new flock of Goldfinches

Well what a wonderful start back to term as grown up Year 4s! The children have made us so proud of their calmness, kindness and enthusiasm to get back into learning and it has been lovely to start getting to know each other.

 Star of the week goes to: Esmae and Yara

 Top Table award goes to: Amy

This week:

We have been so good at getting to know the routines within school and the classroom. Our new Goldfinches are already showing us how Ready, Respectful and Safe they are in school and how much they value our 3 school rules.

This week in worship we have introduced our focus Christian Value: Friendship and have enjoyed discussion, practical and reflective activities based around this theme. There have been some lovely moments of kindness between the children throughout the week.

We have enjoyed starting our new writing and reading focus texts, begun our maths focus on place value and have created some beautiful Goldfinch birds in art to sit in the tree in our classroom. Our Goldfinch birds represent the way we are all unique whilst being together in one ‘flock’.

Next Week:

Reading and Writing: We will explore more of our writing text ‘Gorilla’ by Anthony Browne and find out about real Gorillas. Our reading text ‘A world full of animal stories’ will help us to explore asking questions in order to find out more and delve deeper.

Reading homework: Please support your child to read for 10-20 minutes daily. Across the week this can be a mixture of your child reading to themselves and talking about the book with you, your child reading aloud to you and you reading aloud to your child. Please sign in your child’s diary when s/he has read. The children will be supported to choose from a range of books available in the classroom. Reading can include articles from Children’s First News Papers and science or animal magazines (like National Geographic, Chester Zoo magazines) as well as Fact and research books on linked science and history topics.

Spelling Homework:

Our focus spelling pattern is adding the prefixes un, in, im, mis, dis, to a word to give it the opposite meaning.

Spellings will be stuck into diaries on Fridays and the children will be tested the following Friday. Please support your child to learn the following spellings:

disagree, diasble, mistreat, misunderstood, unfair, unlikely, inhuman, inactive, misspell, mistrust

Maths: Monday Maths with Mrs Judge will focus on angles and arithmetic.

Maths with Mrs Evans will focus on representing 4 digit numbers in different ways including on a number line. We will continue to work on arithmetic activities on some afternoons and will work on our times tables daily.

Times Tables Homework: Times tables are a big focus for Year 4 so each week I will be linking an online times table game or sending a paper game home with the children to support them to practise in a fun way.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

Use Hit the Button to recap the times tables for last year (3X, 4X, 8X) and have a go at the 6X. If you are a tables whizz, have a go at the mixed game.

The children have also all got their TTRockstars logins stuck in the front of their diaries. https://ttrockstars.com/

Science: Our science focus for this half term is Sound so we will enjoy exploring how sounds are made and heard and learning some of the key vocabulary.

RE: On Mondays Goldfinches will be learning about the Holy Spirit with Mrs Judge.

German: The children loved their first ‘live lesson’ with Mrs Judge this week and showed superb listening and participation skills.

History: The theme in Year 4 for our topic focus is LEGACY. Fridays will be our Topic themed days. Next week we will explore the legacy left behind by the Ancient Shang dynasty.

PE: We will enjoy cricket on Wednesdays (until half term) and Gymnastics and team building games with Mr Ault on Fridays

PSHCE: Our focus to begin the year is ‘Get Heart Smart’ and we will also be reading and exploring a range of No Outsiders books. We loved reading ‘The Fogettery this week’ which was about treasured memories.

Music: While Mrs Evans is teaching the Year 5 class swimming, Miss Beattie will be enjoying a music lesson with Goldfinches each week following our Charanga programme and Abba theme this term.

We look forward to getting to know you over the coming weeks. Please don’t hesitate to contact us via the office if you would like to discuss anything about your child. Have a lovely weekend and see you next week.

Mrs Evans, Mrs Judge and Mrs Shimmin.