Geography

A Tale of Two Cities will take us on a journey around the globe. We will begin by learning about the tropics and continents, before focusing more closely on Europe and the United Kingdom. We will investigate the differences between the British Isles, Great Britain and the United Kingdom and there will be plenty of opportunities to develop our map-reading and atlas skills. Our main focus for the topic will be based around cities, both in the UK and beyond. We will explore what makes a city an appealing place to live, make comparisons with villages and research and present information about cities which interest us.

You could find out some information about your favourite city to share with the class!

English

We will start the term by exploring narratives and using a traditional Spanish tale, ‘El Medio Pollito’ to recap our Year 3 writing skills and starting to learn new writing skills for Year 4. We will learn how to change direct speech into indirect speech and how to accurately punctuate these. We will also look at synonyms, prepositions and expanded noun phrases to work on building prepositional noun phrases. We will explore non-fiction texts using the format of leaflets, blogs and postcards, and we will finish the term with persuasive texts.

Homework will be sent home weekly on a Monday and spellings will go home on a Friday.

Maths

Maths this term will be based around place value and number. We will learn to read and write numbers to 10 000 and recognise the place value of each digit in a 4-digit number. We will learn how to compare and order numbers and will be challenged to use place value knowledge to solve problems where numbers are represented in a variety of different ways. We will use partitioning and begin to explore negative numbers and Roman numerals. Later in the term, we will begin to develop adding and subtracting skills by practising recall of facts up to 1000 and then move on to adding two 4-digit numbers with one exchange. We will continue learning times tables through a range of fun and interactive ways.

Homework will be sent home weekly.

P.E.

This term we will be enjoying athletics and football.

Science

Electricity and circuits will be our focus in science to begin the year. We will start by looking at electrical safety and ways that we can keep ourselves safe. After this, we will build our own simple electrical circuits and represent these using diagrams. We will then explore different materials and their properties and will then move on to investigate whether the different materials would be conductors and insulators.