We are Mrs Mulligan, Mrs Cooke, Miss Liao and Miss Harris.

We are really excited to be teaching your children in Year 4 this academic year.
When we are planning new exciting activities, Miss Monk and Mrs Cradock will be teaching PE or Forest School. This is currently on Friday afternoons.

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

Year 4 Class Teacher

(Monday-Tuesday)

Mrs Cooke

Year 4 Class Teacher

(Wednesday-Friday)

Miss Liao

Year 4 Class Teacher

Miss Harris

Teaching Assistant

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.

Year 4 Summer Term Experience

Monday 10th June - 4L Music Experience (onsite) and Tuesday 11th June - 4CM Music Experience (onsite)

ALL YEAR 4 Parents/Carers are invited to watch the Music Experience Performance on Tuesday 11th June. Details to follow nearer the time.

After Easter, we will continue to read 'Woof!' by Allan Ahlberg. This humorus book is about Eric; a perfectly ordinary boy - perfectly ordinary, that is, until the night he turns into a dog! This is the story of his adventures with his best friend, Roy, and their efforts to puzzle out the reason for his transformation.

Our next class novel is ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes. We will continue to focus on the children's understanding of new vocabulary, story settings, plot and characters.

In class, we teach reading every day through choral reading for fluency, checking the 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 Summer term, we will be focusing on a range of sentence types including compound, complex sentences, direct speech, semi colons and other types of punctuation to add detail for the reader. 

First, the children will be looking at the text 'Until I Met Dudley' by Roger McGough. Have you ever wondered how a toaster works? Or a fridge-freezer, or a washing-up machine? In this explanation text book, Dudley, the techno-wizard dog, takes you through the processes behind familiar machines.

We are also going to look at 'The Colours of History' by Clive Gifford. Why did Roman emperors wear purple? Which colour is made from crushed beetles? What green pigment might be used to build super-fast computers of the future? Find out the answers to these and many more questions in this vibrant exploration of the stories behind different colours, and the roles they've played throughout history. Every shade has a story to tell. This book is a feast for the eyes and the mind, ready to enthral budding artists and historians alike.

During the first half of the Summer term, Year 4 will continue with reading time and converting between digital and analogue. After this, we will be moving onto Length and Perimeter, where children will be calculating the perimeter of rectilinear shapes. The next topic will be Fractions where we add and subtract fractions. Through these sessions, children will be developing their mathematical vocabulary and will be applying their knowledge to reasoning and problem solving. At the end of summer term, we will be looking at Decimals.

In addition, children will focus on their times tables and arithmetic skills. This will be done through daily retrieval tasks, so they will get plenty of practice.

Children in Year 4 are required to know the times tables up to 12x, ready for the Multiplication Timestables Check (MTS) on Thursday 13th June.

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. 

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. In addition, we will add a selection of Common Exception Words (CEW) and High Frequency Words (HFW) to the lists below.

There is going to be repetition of words now, to review and consolidate spellings from previous weeks.

Please focus on one week at a time.

Summer 1 - The following spellings are now out of 20.

Week commencing 8/4/24

r

HFW - new  work   other  took  think  home  because   people

Week commencing 15/4/24

s

CEW - sugar should would could last clothes beautiful who

Week commencing 22/4/24

t

CEW - which after again every half plant whole hold

Week commencing 29/4/24

z

CEW - everybody poor any eye hour pretty wild both

Week commencing 6/5/24

sh

CEW - class fast improve old prove climb father kind

Week commencing 13/5/24

ay

CEW - break behind floor gold many past sure told

Week commencing 20/5/24

ee

CEW - parents child water hold great grass bath steak

Summer2 - The following spellings are still out of 20, containing other year 4 statutory spellings.

Week commencing 3/6/24

ie

Year 4 Statutory Spellings - accident calendar eight guide mention possession straight caught

SUMMER TERM

Science: States of Matter (Summer 1) and Electricity (Summer 2)

Religious Education: Buddhism - Buddha's Teachings (Summer 1) and Christianity - Prayer and Worship  (Summer 2)

PSHE: How can our choices make a difference to others and the environment? (Summer 1) How we manage risk in different places? (Summer 2)

History: The Stuarts (Summer 1 and 2)

Geography: London and South East England (Summer 1) and Japan (Summer 2)

Computing: Spreadsheets (Summer 1) and Effective Searching (Summer 2)

French:  Face and Body parts, Feeling Unwell and Jungle Animals.

Art: Byzantine Monuments (Summer 1) and Needlework and Weaving (Summer 2)

Music: Black Bird - The Beatles

PE: Tennis 

Forest School: Den building, bush craft and camp fire safety

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.

Useful Websites

Times tables learn and practise

www.timestables.co.uk 

Arcademics

www.arcademics.com 

Maths is fun

www.mathsisfun.com/timestable.html 

Hit the button

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

Coconut multiples

www.topmarks.co.uk/times-tables/coconut-multiples 

Fishing

https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/306/Maths-Fishing-Multiplication 

Tommy’s Trek

https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/318/Tommys-Trek-Times-Tables 

Andrew Jeffrey videos for parents

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/oxford-owl-videos/videos-fun-maths-games/#timestablesgames 

Ordering and Sequencing Numbers Games (topmarks.co.uk)

PhonicsPlay

Primary Homework Help | Online Games For Kids - BBC Bitesize

DK Find Out! | Fun Facts for Kids on Animals, Earth, History and more!

BookTrust: Getting children reading | BookTrust

Our DT topic this term has involved designing, creating and stuffing a cushion.
The children have worked really hard and should be so proud of all their lovely cushions and hard work.