Welcome to Year 4!

Croeso i Flwyddyn Pedwar!  

Welcome to the Year 4 class page. Here you will find useful information and reminders related to our general routines and activities, aswell as links to helpful websites and online resources.

This is also a space where we will share and celebrate some of the interesting and exciting activities we are carrying out at school.

Spring Newsletter

Year 4

Pen y Fro Primary School

January 25

Dear Parents/ Carers,

Happy New Year! Welcome back to a new term at Pen y fro Primary School. I hope you and your families have all had a wonderful Christmas. The Spring Term is always a busy and exciting phase of the school year.  Our central topic this term is ‘One World, One Chance’ in which we will explore issues such as sustainability, plastic waste in our oceans, deforestation and other ways in which humans affect the planet. Much of our work will be linked to this topic, including our literacy, numeracy, Design and Technology and art. The children have already began to plan some of the activities they would like to carry out to investigate this topic further. They are showing a lot of passion and interest towards this very important subject. 

The children will be involved in the planning of our topic work and we will use their ideas to form the basis of our studies. The work will link to the six areas of learning: Literacy, Languages and Communication, Mathematics and Numeracy, Science and Technology, Humanities, Expressive Arts and Health and Well-Being. We are currently organising a school trip related to this topic, more details and arrangements will follow shortly. If you have any books or items of interest related to the class topic, please send them in for your child to show to the rest of the class.

In our science and technology lessons, we will be learning about Living Things, Habitats and Food Chains. In our literacy lessons, we will continue to look at a variety of written text types including non-chronological report writing and argument and persuasion. We will continue with number, shape, space and measures and handling data in our mathematics and numeracy lessons. We also have St David’s Day and UNICEF Day to look forward to!    

Other class routines include:

• Our weekly PE sessions will take place on a Tuesday and Thursday. Please ensure that children bring appropriate kit for PE days in a small-labelled bag. PE kit should include a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms/ shorts (which should be plain blue, navy or white if possible) and trainers.

• The children are able to bring fruit for break time either in their lunchbox or in a small tub, which they can keep in their individual trays. They are also required to bring a bottle of water, which we are able to refill as and when throughout the day.  Please ensure that these are all labelled.  

• Please ensure that your child has their book bag and ‘reading record’ in school every day.  Please listen to your child read as often as possible and make a weekly comment in their reading record. A discussion with your child about what he/ she has read can also help to check understanding. 

• Our class Welsh mascot will be sent home with one of the pupils each week to spend the weekend with them. Please can you encourage your child to write (in Welsh) about their weekend in the notebook that will be inside the bag. There are also guide sheets and a Welsh dictionary inside the bag to help the children. Photos and drawings are also welcome.

Homework will continue to be issued on a Friday, to be returned by the following Wednesday. Spelling tests will continue to take place on a Friday, alongside mixed mental maths/times table tests. Children will be expected to write 5 spelling sentences from their weekly spelling words. Children will continue to be provided with five weeks of spelling words at a time, with the sixth week being a review test of ten words selected from the spelling list (words from the previous five weeks). The first spelling tests will take place on Friday 17^th January.

As well as spelling sentences, each week for homework, the main homework task will alternate between a maths task and a topic-related task from the homework grid, which will be generated using children’s planning ideas in school. The children will be issued with a paper copy of the new topic related homework grid. We will also use MyMaths for some of the maths homework activities. Children’s usernames and passwords will remain the same as last year. The first homework will be issued on Friday 10^thJanuary and will be spelling sentences and a homework grid task.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued help and support. I look forward to seeing you throughout the course of the term and please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any worries or concerns.

Kind regards,

Mrs K Matthews

Year 4 Teacher.

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