Belle Vue Primary School

Children Year groups

Welcome to Year 4!

Academic Year 2024-2025

We are Mrs Mulligan, Mrs Cooke, Miss Tomkins, Miss Harris and Miss James.

We are really excited to be teaching your children in Year 4 this academic year.
When we are planning new exciting activities, Mrs Silwood-Monk and Mrs Huggins will be teaching PE. This is currently on Friday mornings. Your child will be able to come into school on this day, wearing their PE kit.

Please do not hesitate to contact us via email at info@belle-vue.dudley.sch.uk or leave a message with the office on 01384 389900 if you have any questions.

Mrs Mulligan

Assistant Headteacher and Deputy DSL

4CM Class Teacher

(Monday-Tuesday)

Mrs Cooke

4CM Class Teacher

(Wednesday-Friday)

Miss Tomkins

4T Class Teacher

Miss Harris

Teaching Assistant

Miss James

Teaching Assistant

The 'Belle Vue Way'

Our three school rules are:

Be Ready
Be Respectful
Be Safe

We also have four listening skills that we actively teach across school. These are:

Good listening is…sitting still
Good listening is…staying quiet
Good listening is…looking at the person who is talking
Good listening is…listening to all of the words

Spring Term Key Dates

This is an overview of events throughout the year. All of these dates are provisional and may be subject to change.
Further details regarding the events will be sent out nearer the time.

Spring Term 2024/25	Spring Term 2025
Monday 24^th February	Term Starts
Thursday 27^th February	Year 4 Residential Meeting 2:45pm-3:20pm
Thursday 6^th March	World Book Day
Wednesday 12^th March-Friday 14^th March	Year 4 Residential
WC Monday 24^TH March	KS1 and KS2 Mother’s Day Breakfasts
Friday 28^th March	Nursery and Reception Mother’s Day workshop
WC Monday 31^st March	Assessment Week and DT Week
WC Monday 7^th April	DT Week
Thursday 10^th April	Belle Vue Spring Fayre
Friday 11^th April	Last Day of Term
Monday 14^th April- Friday 25^th April	Easter Holidays

Current Term

Reading

Writing

Maths

Spring 2 - Our next class novel is 'The legend of Podkin One-Ear' by Kieran Larwood. Podkin is the son of a warrior chieftain. He knows that one day it will be up to him to lead his warren and guard it in times of danger. But for now, he's quite happy to laze around annoying his older sister Paz, and playing with his baby brother Pook. Then Podkin's home is brutally attacked, and the young rabbits are forced to flee. The terrifying Gorm are on the rampage, and no one and nowhere is safe. With danger all around them, Podkin must protect his family, uncover his destiny, and attempt to defeat the most horrifying enemy rabbitkind has ever known.

In class, we teach reading every day through choral reading of a variety of different texts and extracts, checking for fluency, understanding of vocabulary and helping the children to understand a wide range of texts through key questioning.

The children will have a reading book that they bring home every night, selected from a key reading stage. Please could you ensure that they bring this in every day as they will read in class daily. It is important that your child practises their reading daily for around 10 minutes to build upon their fluency and comprehension skills.

After February half term, we will begin to write our own non- chronological report. A non-chronological report is a type of non-fiction text that provides information about a particular subject or event. It does not follow events in order of time. The structure of a non-chronological report typically includes an introduction, paragraphs organised by theme, and a conclusion.

As a part of the writing process, the children will review their work and make changes and revisions.

During the second half of the Spring term, Year 4 will consolidate their multiplication and division skills, and solve more challenging problems by working through different steps, finding different solutions. The children will then explore 'Length and Perimeter', looking at KM and M, equivalent lengths, perimeters of rectangles, polygons and other rectilinear shapes, finding missing lengths and calculating lengths too. In addition, the children will then focus on 'Fractions', looking at mixed numbers and improper fractions.

In addition to daily maths lessons, children will focus on their times tables and arithmetic skills.

Handwriting
Handwriting will be taught every day using the 'Letter-Join' handwriting program. The children will be expected to use joined handwriting, leading to a cursive style by Year 6. It is a key component in developing children's writing. Throughout these lessons, the children will be taught about letter families, number formation and High Frequency Words.

It would be extremely beneficial if you could support your child with their handwriting at home too. Simply follow the code below to access a range of activities to practise their 'letter-joins'.

Spelling
Spelling will be a key aspect of developing writing skills and will be taught daily. Twelve spellings, linked to phonics sounds, will be learnt each week and will be found below.
Spelling tests will take place on Friday and include the 12 words learnt that week and other spellings from previous weeks for recapping.

Spelling Lists

The children are practising a variety of spellings within class. There are no formal spelling tests currently.

Wider Curriculum

SPRING TERM

Science: Sound

Religious Education: Christianity and The Bible. The Easter Story.

PSHE: Puberty

History: continued in the summer term

Geography: Regions of the UK and Europe

Computing: Online Safety and Effective Searching

French: Moving Our Bodies

Art: Space

Music: Exploring Feelings When You Play

PE: Badminton, Tennis and Swimming

Forest School - Dates to be announced (please look out for messages from us)

Swimming - Dates to be announced (please look out for messages from us)

DT - Focus Weeks - every term

Homework

Homework is set in accordance with our SMART policy (please see the policy on the website). We expect all children to be practising their spellings and multiplication skills at home each week using the suggested websites below. On some occasions, we may send out homework documents to further support skills and concepts that they will have already encountered in class.