Welcome back Puffins faster your Christmas break

Welcome back Puffins! I hope that you have had a great Christmas and are raring to get started on the new and exciting topics that lay ahead. 

Topic

We will start this half-term with a Geography topic: "The Island", which is based on an exciting adventure story set in the Arctic which follows the story of a young Girl and her experiences with a polar bear. The topic itself covers many aspects of how people came to settle in England and how they lived. Along-side this, our DT and Wild Tribe lessons will be looking at cooking outdoors, simple foods and soup.

In the second half-term, we will closely look at the history of the Saxon and Viking invasion and how they came to be in England and how they lived. This topic will follow the book "How to Train Your Dragon"

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).

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 to help your child develop their fluency. 

The Curriculum

The rest of the curriculum at Stowford is a well crafted mix of: Science, Geography, History, Art, Music, MFL, RE, DT, Computing and PHSE. With all of our topics 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 be on a Wednesday and again children should come into school dressed in their PE kits.

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.