Welcome to Italy Class

Topological Map of Italy

Painted by the children of Italy Class 2019/2020

Meet the Teacher/s
On 11th September, we held a 'meet the teacher' session where we outlined academic expectations for Year 4s, details of homework routines, what we'll be teaching/learning and the exciting activities planned for 2019/2020.

Residential
Most notably, for Y4s, we have our exciting three day (two nights) residential at Cranham Woods, near Cheltenham. We have provisional dates reserved in the week 18th-22nd May. We'll let everyone know more when our hosts have confirmed everything.

Y4 School Play

Around Easter, depending on other curriculum commitments, we will be rehearsing and performing our Y4 play for both school children and parents/family members - more information to come soon.

PE

The children in Italy Class have PE on Wednesday afternoons and Thursday mornings. In some cases, their kit will be wet or muddy, in which case we will send it home for a wash or dry overnight so please remember to bring it back on a Thursday morning.

School Uniform and PE Kit
Please ensure that all of your child's uniform and PE kit is labelled with their name (shoes/trainers too) as too often we lose items or have unwanted clothing within our own classroom let alone the wider school.

Learning at home
Spellings

Each child has been sent home with a copy of the Y3/4 spelling list. This National Curriculum list of words are those that your child needs to know by year end or sooner as they will be tested on them. Having the list visible at home and helping them to find fun ways of learning the words will help your child immensely. In addition, we will be teaching spelling rules day by day, in class, for many other words.

Print your own: 

Times tables

A Y4 objective (expectation) is that each child will know all twelve of the times tables that we teach. Year 4s now undertake a national test (online) at the end of each academic year to establish their times table knowledge. To prepare them for this, we use the school iPads to improve both their knowledge and speed. You can help them at home by accessing the website: www.timestables.co.uk  (choose Speed Test from the right hand menu). Your child should know the rest of the drill - they all seem to enjoy it.

www.timestables.co.uk

Reading

While we will undertake reading comprehension (reading and understanding) each day at school, a child's reading is best advanced by reading regularly at home. A good reader inevitably leads to a good writer and enables access in greater depth to more of the curriculum.

Home School Books

By now, your child should have signed the agreement at the front of the book. These books replace the old Reading Records. They allow you to record your child's daily reading at home and add comments about any matter that you might wish to raise with us. Children are expected to bring these books with them every day and on Thursdays we will review each child's progress in reading at home. Please support this whenever you can.

Our Big Question

For terms 3 and 4, our Big Question is: What Makes A Journey Worth Making?

We started by examining our own journeys over the Christmas holidays, recording the dfferent types of transport we used, how often and how far we travelled. We used this data to create bar graphs and pie charts in Microsoft Excel.

Our class literacy text for Term 3 is Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. Our hero, also called Michael, sets off on a round the world voyage with his parents after they both lose their jobs and sell their house. Michael and pet dog Stella get washed overboard in the Coral Sea and find themselves marooned on a desert island. They are not alone: Kensuke is a Japanese soldier left behind after WWII.

In science we will be studying electricity and sound using our DT skills to construct useful items for a desert island.

In maths we will be focused on different strategies for solving multiplication and division problems. Time tables are coming along at a great pace but keep up the focus on speed of recall and the inverse division facts.

All children should now have two school library books on which they can complete reading quizzes which record the number of words read, amongst other data. To do a quiz, it is important that the child has a thorough understanding of the text. To date (5th February), Italy Class has a combined total of just over one million words read! Well done!

Mr Burton & Mr Frost

Map of Italian Regions

Painted by Italy Class