Welcome 

Welcome to Year 4!

I hope that this page helps to keep you informed of learning and events taking place throughout the year.

Our Curriculum

Below is an overview of our curriculum for this term

Knowledge Organisers

To help re-enforce learning, please find a series of knowledge organisers for each topic. Regular reading and quizzing from these will help your child retain key facts and free up working memory to focus on the development of historical and scientific skills. 

PE

PE day is on Tuesday. Children should come dressed in their PE kits on Tuesdays. Swimming lessons are on Friday afternoons- children should bring their swimming kits to school and be collected from Castleton pool from 3.15pm.

Homework

Times tables and spellings are sent home every Friday. Please do not return the homework to school. We would greatly appreciate a photograph to be sent via the SEESAW app to show your child's work.

In addition to this, all children have been provided with a set of six workbooks linked to Maths and English. These books cover the content of the Year 4 curriculum and have been purchased by the school to help your child re-enforce the learning covered in class. These will be used for homework. As answers are in the back, they do not need to be returned to school for marking. If however, when working through these, you discover an area of the curriculum with which your child is really struggling, then please let me know via e-mail or seesaw and I will do my best to offer support.

Home / School Reading

All children have been provided with a new reading pack that includes:

• An Accelerated Reader book and a Reading for Pleasure book
• A Reading Journal (please aim to fill this in three times a week, when you read with your child)
• A Reading Activity booklet (your child can complete an activity in this booklet at any time but I would suggest using it for books that he / she has really enjoyed)
• A Reading Bookmark (this contains question prompts that you can use when reading with your child and covers all eight reading domains or skills that your child needs to practise)

Reading packs should be brought to school every day.

Accelerated Reader

Along with the new reading packs, I am sure you will be aware that the school are now using Accelerated Reader to help boost children’s interest and engagement in reading.

Children have a wide range of books from which to choose (their Zone of Proximal Development). After completing their book, they take a short quiz that ranges from 5 to 10 questions, depending on the complexity of the text. This quiz may be taken at home or at school. Through these quizzes, children build up points and work towards a target so they can see their progress as they read through their chosen books.

You too can view progress through Renaissance Home Connect using the password and web link sent home last week.

Many children in our class have completed at least one quiz and seem very keen to read. Please support them in this new school endeavour, as fluent reading builds confidence, opens doors to new experiences and is the key to increasingly independent learning.

Year 3/ 4 Spellings

These are the key words that children should be able to spell and use by the end of Year 4.

Useful Websites: