Welcome to Puffins' Page

Hello and welcome back. I hope that you had a great summer holiday and are looking forward to the start of Year 4!

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. Please make sure that children read out loud as often as possible and focus on their prosody (the stress and intonation when reading) as well as asking questions about what they have read.

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 writing aspects of the genre. We will start by looking at sentence composition, before moving on to poetry, writing adventure stories, diary entries and newspaper articles. Our reading book in this first half term is The Queen's Nose by Dick King-Smith. 

Maths

We will continue to use "White Rose" as our learning scheme. During this autumn term, we will be looking at place value in detail, followed by adding and subtracting and measurement, There is a statutory timestables 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, all children should be confident and fluent. I can recommend Hit the Button or www.timestables.co.uk as a resource, which are both excellent ways​ to help your child develop their fluency. 

The Curriculum

Through the History curriculum, we will be looking at The Roman Republic. 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 The Rhine and the Mediterranean. Children will use new and existing geographical skills in order to investigate the important of these two topics.

Through Science, children will be exploring living things and their habitats.

The rest of the curriculum at Stowford is a well-crafted mix of art, music, MFL, RE, PE and computing. 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. 

PHSE is taught through Jigsaw and is also an integral part of our working week; we have a dedicated weekly lesson where we explore the personal, social and emotional aspects of the lives of young people living in our modern world.

PE lessons will take place on a Wednesday afternoon and the children will need to come to school in PE kits. Our other PE lesson will be on a Friday morning, which will be gymnastics in the hall, for which the children will have to wear PE kit including shorts for safety on the apparatus.

We encourage clear and open communication with parents. So if you do have any questions, then please feel free to ask at the classroom door in the morning. Alternatively, you can contact us via Class Dojo messages.