Curlews
Welcome to Curlews' Page
Welcome to the new Curlews! I hope that you have had a fantastic Summer holiday and raring to get stuck into the new term!
English
Reading is at the heart of everything that we do, and we hope to develop children's stamina, fluency and prosody for reading and encourage children to be able to read for longer periods of time. We would hope that children can read, without distractions, for at least 15 minutes by now. We will always be reading a book in the classroom and there will be ample opportunity for children to read independently. If you could make sure that children read out loud as often as possible and focus on their prosody (the stress and intonation when reading).
English and Spelling will link to some of the themes seen in our reading lessons, and we aim to deliver a mix of clear and precise teaching opportunities whilst inspiring children to develop their love of writing. Writing tends to follow a 2 weekly cycle, where new genres are introduced and explored. Children will have the chance to look at model texts and practise aspects of the genre before writing a final piece.
Maths
We will continue to use "White Rose" as our learning scheme and much of the resources for this can be found online if you want to follow what we are doing and support your child at home. I've added the 
yearly overview to the bottom of this page. There are daily videos on White Rose which are excellent to use if you want to make sure that your child is fully confident with the days content. Now that we are in the Autumn term we will be focussing on; place value, addition, subtraction and multiplication. There is a statutory Times Tables test in June, so please keep working on the speed and recall of the times tables facts. The expectation is that by the end of year 4, they should be confident and fluent. I can recommend; Hit the button or timestables.co.uk as a resource which are both excellent ways
The Curriculum
Through the History curriculum, we will be looking at many aspects of the ancient Egyptian culture through an investigative approach. Children will learn to develop their historical enquiry skills and explore the impact of certain moments in time on the rest of the world.
In our Geography lessons, we will be looking at rivers and their impact. We will look at how they are created and what function they serve on people living close by. Children will learn to compare and contrast different rivers and why settlements were built around rivers over time.
Through Science, children will be examining the features of vertebrates and invertebrates. They will be exploring how to create a classification key. This unit will be enriched with the opportunity to watch "My Octopus Teacher" which investigates the life, and subsequent death, of an octopus.
The rest of the curriculum at Stowford is a well crafted mix of: Art, Music, MFL, RE, DT, Computing and PHSE. With any curriculum, we try and make links and connections wherever possible. A class book is at the heart of the topic, and we actively promote and encourage "joined up thinking", where ideas from one area of the curriculum can support and inspire other areas.
We will continue to have Ms Kee for one of our PE sessions. These lessons will happen on a Thursday afternoon and the children will need to come to school in PE kits. Our other PE lesson will take the form of a multi-skills lesson which will be on a Tuesday.
Wild Tribe will continue this year but instead of a weekly session, year 4 children will have a Wild Tribe day once every term. More details for this will be sent out nearer the time.
We encourage clear and open communication with parents regarding any aspect of the time that your child is with us. So if you do have any questions then please feel free to ask; however, we would prefer it if you spoke to us at the end of the day rather than the beginning and if you need a longer appointment then we will accommodate you when we can. Alternatively, you can contact us via Class Dojo messages.