Monksmead School

Respect, Reflect, Believe, Succeed

Welcome to Year 4

Teacher : Mr Hibbard

TA:  Mrs Smith,  Ms Herrero, Ms McGinley

 Happy New Year, Year 4!

I hope you all had a restful break over the holidays and are excited for our Spring Term.

 

PE kits
For this term, Year 4 will have PE lessons every Tuesday and Wednesday.

Please ensure that they have their named PE kit at school at all times and that it is suitable for both indoor and outdoor PE.

 

Homework 
Homework will be handed out every Wednesday and will consist of maths and English tasks, which will help to consolidate the children’s learning. The homework will need to be handed back in on the following Monday, along with their Reading Records. Homework that is not handed in or completed to a satisfactory standard will have to be completed at lunchtime.

 

Reading in Year Four
In Year 4, once your child has moved beyond ‘Lime’ and are reading books from the Year 4 classroom bookshelf, their reading will take place during Whole Class Guided Reading sessions. They will still take home their reading books to read at home with an adult and this will need to be recorded in their reading records as usual.

 

Please make sure you listen to them read these books regularly at home (a few pages or a chapter at a time, depending on the book length) and put your signature in their reading record each time you do. Whenever they finish their reading book, they will take another from the classroom bookshelf and record it in their reading record. In addition to their reading book, they may choose a book from our KS2 library as their ‘shared reading’ book. This can be swapped whenever they wish to move onto a new book.

 

For children who have ‘White’ or ‘Lime’ as their reading book, they will read each week with an adult one-to-one at school, as well as reading regularly at home with an adult. Their ‘shared reading’ book will be a chapter book they’ve chosen from the classroom bookshelf.

 

For children who are reading books from ‘Gold’ or below, they will read each week with an adult one-to-one at school, as well as reading regularly at home with an adult. Their ‘shared reading’ book will match the colour of their reading book. During independent reading at school, they are welcome to read books from our classroom bookshelf.

 

In Year 4, there are no longer any designated reading days, as an adult may need to read with your child at any point during the week. Therefore, please make sure your child keeps their reading book and reading record in their bags at all times.

 

Water Bottles

Please make sure that your child has a named water bottle in school so that they can keep hydrated during the day.  Due to hygiene reasons, it is difficult to provide cups for the children, so it is important they have their own water bottle. 

 

If you have any questions or queries about the above, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see below for our timetable and the KS2 Long Term Plan, which shows what the children will be learning this year in Year 4.

 

Thank you for your support,

Mr. Hibbard

 

Year 4 Spring Timetable 2024

 

Reading in KS2

In KS2 children have daily whole-class reading lessons.  At Monksmead, we use VIPERS from Literacy Shed Comprehension Plus to help structure the learning and ensure that all key skills are being learnt.    

VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum.  They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.  The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc.  As such, VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and students are familiar with, a range of questions.  They allow the teacher to track the type of questions asked and the children’s responses to these which allows for targeted questioning afterwards.

 

To support the children in accurately answering comprehension questions, we use A.P.E.   This stands for 'Answer', ' Prove it' and 'Explain it'.

 

Science Knowledge Organisers  - Spring 2024

 

Click on the images below to enlarge the knowledge organiser for the individual topic area.