Ms May | Primary 4 Class Blog 2024-2025

Primary 4 2024/25

October

Literacy

We have been working hard across all areas of literacy – spelling, reading, writing, grammar, handwriting and talking and listening.

The use of VCOP pyramids, thesauruses and word banks have allowed us to up-level our writing even more – we are becoming much more independent at accessing these.

The writing genres we have practised this term are recount and description. We have focused on structure, punctuation and interesting vocabulary.

‘You always have to use past tense in a recount because it’s about something that’s already happened.’ – Ozy

‘We had to use adjectives in our descriptions. We used a thesaurus to make sure we used interesting words.’ – Morris

Now that we are in Primary 4, our spelling words are becoming more and more challenging. We have been learning tricky phonemes and can show that we understand them by diacritically marking them.

‘On a Tuesday we do diacritical marking. We have to write our words down and mark it with a dot, line or rainbow arch.’ – Halle

Our class novel, The Invisible Boy, has allowed us to practise our reading strategies.

‘If we find a tricky word in our book we read around it and try and work out what it means. After we’ve done that we would look in a dictionary to see if we were right or wrong.’– Leo

After the October holiday, we will begin our new novel – Flat Stanley: The Great Egyptian Grave Robbery. We are already making predictions about what could happen.

Numeracy and Maths

This session, we are doing maths lessons a little bit differently. Instead of being put into groups, Miss May teaches us a new concept and then we can choose the level of follow-up task that we complete. This has been really popular in our class because we like taking some responsibility for our learning and challenging ourselves.

‘Miss May lets us choose what level we do. We can choose from Silver, Gold or Platinum.’ – Leah

‘We choose the right level for us.’ – Hannah

‘It lets us challenge ourselves and it means Miss May listens to our opinions.’ – Harley

A new resource we have made great use of this term is Numicon. We love how it can be used to support lots of different skills and strategies, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and fractions.

On Thursdays, Mrs Brock has been teaching us all about 2D shapes and 3D objects. We made our very own shape nets attached to string – when we pull them they turn into 3D objects!

IDL

Our topic, The Tudors, has been a firm favourite with the class. One area of the topic we all voted to look into more was Henry VIII. We used the chromebooks to undertake group research, using our information to complete interesting factfiles and detailed descriptive pieces of writing. We even learned a song to remember the order of Henry VIII’s wives… and their gruesome fates!

Lots of comparisons were made between Tudor houses and our own houses now. We noticed big differences between our tiled roofs and the thatched roofs made from straw that the Tudors had. Each pair confidently shared the similarities and differences they identified with the rest of the class.

‘Tudor houses had beams. The top floor was bigger than the bottom floor.’ – Sophie

‘They were made out of wood, clay, sand and animal poo! I wouldn’t like to live in one!’ – Arwyn

We learned about shape, tone and pattern when collaging Tudor roses. We also sketched some wonderful Henry VIII portraits – we are definitely a class of budding artists!

Health and Wellbeing

Mrs Brock has taught us lots about keeping our bodies healthy. We have learned about the importance of a healthy and balanced diet, demonstrating good hygiene and the dangers of smoking.

‘Good hygiene is important because if you don’t keep your body clean you can get very dirty and start to smell.’ – Daniel

‘It is important that you brush your teeth so you don’t get cavities.’ – Kaitlyn

‘If you smoke your lungs can go black because of the nicotine.’ – Elliot

STEM

Mrs Brock has also taught us lots of interesting facts about different states of water during our science lessons. We have carried out different experiments, including picking up ice using a piece of string (this worked by melting the ice using salt) and creating our very own rain.

‘It was good because it worked and the string picked up the ice.’ – Markus

‘We tried to make rain with hot water in a jar. We put some ice cubes on top of it and it started to drip.’ – Quinn