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 afternoons. 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

Autumn 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.

Monday 2^nd September	INSET Day
Tuesday 3^rd September	INSET Day
Wednesday 4^th September	Reception Stay and Play and Year Group Introduction meeting for Parents
Tuesday 10^th September	Year 6 Introduction to Year Group and Residential Parent Meeting 2:45-3:30pm
Tuesday 17^th September	Introduction to Year Group Parent Meetings Year 1 2:45-3:00pm Year 3 3:05-3:20pm
Wednesday 18^th September	Introduction to Year Group Parent Meetings Year 4 3:05-3:20pm
Thursday 19th September	Introduction to Year Group Parent Meetings Year 2 3:05-3:20pm
Wednesday 18^th September – Friday 20th Sept	Year 6 Residential Trip – Pioneer Centre
Friday 20th September	Jeans for Genes Day – no donations required
Friday 27^th September	Macmillan Coffee Morning event – details to follow
Tuesday 15^th October	Parents’ Evening 3:45pm-6:15pm
Thursday 17^th October	Parents’ Evening 3:45pm-6:15pm
Friday 18^th October	Foodbank Donations
Monday 21^st October	Harvest Assembly
Thursday 24^th October	Halloween Discos
Friday 25^th October	Last Day of Term

Monday 28^th October – Friday 1st November	Half Term

Friday 8^th November	Belle Vue Fireworks, Bonfire and Food Festival
Tuesday 12^th November	Odd Socks Day (Anti-Bullying awareness week) – no donations required
Friday 15^th November	Children in Need (MUFTI) - donation
WC Monday 25^th November	DT Week
WC Monday 2^nd December	DT Week
Friday 6^th December	Nursery and Reception Christmas Workshop
Monday 9th December	INSET Day
Tuesday 10^th-Friday 13^th December	Assessment Week
Thursday 12th December	KS2 Carol Service at Holy Trinity Church
Friday 13^th December	Christmas Jumper Day/Christmas Lunch
Monday 16^th December	KS1 Christmas Show
Friday 20^th December	Last Day of Term – normal finish times

Monday 23^rd December-Friday 3^rd January	Christmas Break

Current Term

Reading

Writing

Maths

Our first class novel is ‘The Firework Maker's Daughter’ by Philip Pullman. This text is all about discovery and adventure. Lila doesn't just want to be a Firework-Maker's daughter, she wants to be a Firework Maker herself. But although she's learned a lot she still must get through the most difficult and dangerous part of her apprenticeship - and her father won't tell her what it is. In search of this final Firework-Making secret, Lila heads off alone on a journey. It is a journey filled with dangers beyond anything she could have imagined, a journey on which she will learn so much more than the one secret she set out to find . . .

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.

During the Autumn term, we will be focusing on a range of sentence types and skills, consolidating all of their prior knowledge and helping them to build upon this. The children will be looking closely at key punctuation and ensuring they can identify different sentence types.
They will also learn how to extend sentences using conjunctions, adjectives and adverbs.
As a part of the writing process, they will review their work and make changes and revisions.

During the first half of the Autumn term, Year 4 will consolidate their knowledge of place value. Understanding place value is one of the essential concepts in math education and can provide the children with a strong foundation for solving more advanced mathematics problems. Place value allows us to compare numbers and simplify calculations. Ultimately, this knowledge will give them the confidence to solve more challenging problems and work through difficult situations by looking at all aspects of a problem from every angle possible.

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

Here are the spellings that your child will be practising daily, each week. Each set of spellings is grouped by a particular phoneme (sound) and then the groups of letters (grapheme) that make that sound. We would encourage your child to use syllables and sound buttons to break each word down. It is also important to discuss the meaning of each word.

Please focus on one week at a time.

Week commencing 9/09/24- sound ay

display	plane	plain	rain
rein	reign	eighth	regulate
break	grate	great	brake

Week commencing 16/09/24- sound e

mention	peculiar	possession	pressure
bread	accept	except	whether
weather	many	extreme	any

Week commencing 23/09/24- sound ee

peace	piece	bury	berry
empathy	sympathy	heal	heel
he’ll	peculiar	various	reveal

Week commencing 30/09/24- sound i

experiment	history	imagine	increase
binoculars	interest	ordinary	building
analysis	image	builder	fitter

Week commencing 7/10/24- sound ie

tie	site	survive	highlight
style	incisor	bicycle	homicide
deny	describe	exercise	height

Week commencing 14/10/24- sound oe

telescope	periscope	microscope	microchip
sole	role	code	potatoes
notice	although	notice	shown

Week commencing 21/11/24- sound u

unfair	undone	enough	reluctant
company	method	random	rough
tough	millimeter	milliliter	recover

HALF TERM

Week commencing 4/11/24- sound ue

popular	regular	few	pursue
unicycle	unique	united	evacuate
vacuum	neutral	stewed	chewy

Week commencing 11/11/24- sound ar

heart	guard	market	target
father	farther	past	passed
disaster	barge	calm	farmer

Week commencing 18/11/24- sound ear

weary	cereal	serial	Interfere
sincerely	experience	period	here
hear	peer	pier	steered

Week commencing 25/11/24- sound er

firm	consider	exercise	verdict
learn	grammar	favourite	Peculiar
popular	certain	certified	conquer

Week commencing 2/12/24- sound oo

fool	grew	group	bruise
suitable	revolution	lose	Remove
choose	cruise	rudest	undo

Week commencing 9/12/24- sound or

corpse	explore	corporation	extraordinary
export	import	audio	audience
audible	organise	overall	source

Wider Curriculum

AUTUMN TERM

Science: The Human Body (Autumn 1) Classification of Plants and Animals (Autumn 2)

Religious Education: Judaism (Autumn 1) Christianity (Autumn 2)

PSHE:What strengths, skills and interests do we have? (Autumn 1) How do we treat each other with respect? (Autumn 2)

History: Life in Ancient Rome

Geography: Spatial Sense

Computing: Coding

French: Phonetics (Autumn 1) Fruit and Vegetables (Autumn 2)

Art: Light (Autumn 1) Space (Autumn 2)

Music: Musical Structures

PE: Gym and Games - Football

Forest School - Dates to be announced

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.