Hello everyone, I hope you are all enjoying spending time together at home with your families. On the school website there are links to helpful resources and reminders of general activities to maintain your home learning. As well as this, below, you will find a list of more specific Year 4 activities that you could do in order to keep your Year 4 learning ticking over. Wishing you all lots of health and happiness and hope to see you all soon.

Mrs Johnson

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are,” (Mason Cooley).

See how many books you can escape into now that we have this extended, uninterrupted time to enjoy reading for pleasure. You could use your reading record to keep a track of the books you have read. Remember, it is your choice whether you would like to read fiction, non-fiction or poetry. Here are some websites that are offering free downloads of books: · https://www.researchify.co.uk/audiobooks.html · www.stories.audible.com · https://subscribe.firstnews.co.uk/free-downloadable-issue/ · https://www.getepic.com/ I have set up an educator account and can add you as a student in my class so that you can access free age-related books. Please email my school account as I will need a parent’s email address I order to invite you to join. Alternatively, your parents can sign up for free with a family account for up to 30 days.

Further reading activities

You could host your own book talk session at home with your family and discuss the books using the 5 PS like we do in class:

· Patterns and Connections – What similarities or patterns have you noticed between this story and other stories?

· Point of View - What is your opinion on the book, the story or the characters? How does you point of view differ from your family’s?

· Puzzles – Do you have any questions about what you have read and are there any potential answers to these questions?

· Picture - What is the wider message of the author?

· Prediction - What do you think might happen next based on what you have already read?

If you have younger brothers and sisters, you could read to them or listen to them read.

The more you read, the more ideas you’ll have to write about. You could do your own writing invention tasks: · Use The Literacy Shed to play a short video and continue writing the story · Write a spine poem about an interesting object/ picture/ photograph. Use Pobble 365 for picture inspiration

· Design your own tourist attraction and write a persuasive text to try to get people to visit

· Write a letter to me or to one of your classmates.

· Keep a diary of your time away from school · Write a non-chronological report about the Anglo-Saxons or Vikings · Write an explanation text about changes of state

Every weekday morning from 9:30am, there will be interviews with authors and poets, including Pie Corbett on www.radioblogging.net It is a chance to write and get interactive with fellow wordsmiths!

We’ve added some information about spelling to the school website for your parents to see. It includes the spelling lists that we use in class.

Fluency

Keep practising your times tables. You could teach your family how to finger roll, use your existing logins for Times Table Rockstars and for Doodle Maths. If you have lost your logins for Times Table Rockstars, email my school account and I’ll remind you what it is. You should be able to access Times Table Rockstars for the duration of the school closure. Remember you can access this through the website https://ttrockstars.com/ or download the app. and also https://www.doodlemaths.com/ or through the app.

You can also find lots of problem solving activities on the NRich website https://nrich.maths.org/14536

Over the next few weeks you could revise your knowledge of States of Matter and also look at the following with some help from your parents:

· Do some science experiments aimed at recognising changes of state through heating and cooling: melt ice cubes, see the affect sprinkling salt has on a melting ice cube, boil the kettle and observe the steam, consider how to condense the water vapour, consider how to investigate evaporation of water from different beakers in different places.

· Identify the part played by evaporation and condensation in the water cycle and associate the rate of evaporation with temperature

STEM science has free resources that families can use at home: https://www.stem.org.uk/home-learning/family-activities - The “Ice is Melting” resource would link in well with finishing off this topic. Further topics to look into would be sound and electricity.

We are coming to the end of our Vikings topic so this would be an excellent time to consolidate all of your learning and link in with some writing activities.

You could:

Write a newspaper report about a Viking raid

Write a story set in the Viking times

Write a diary entry in role as a Viking or as a Briton whose land is being invaded

Write an information text about a specific aspect of Viking culture

Write a quiz about the Vikings and test your family.

Our next topics will be The Mayans (history) and The Amazon Basin (geography), so you could spend time researching these and compiling a scrapbook of your findings or presenting your learning in any way you wish. For example, a make a PowerPoint and present it to your family, build a mini rainforest complete with all its layers or pretend to be an Amazon explorer and report what you have found there.

You could find out information about Claude Monet and try creating some artwork in the style of the artist. See if you can find any tutorials about the basics of watercolour. Find some links for different art activities on the website below: https://www.aspire-sports.co.uk/programme/creative-time

https://www.aspire-sports.co.uk/programme/active-learning 

https://scratch.mit.edu/  Sign up, create a free account and practise creating your own input-output educational game. Let me know how you get on.

We hope this is useful for you and your families to give ideas of some of the things you could be doing to continue your learning.