Year 4

Welcome to the class page for Year 4. 

We're hoping to create a gallery of all the lovely things you're doing while school is closed. 

Send content to r.carson@knottyashprimary.co.uk

Stay safe and happy!

Y3 & 4: BLACK LIVES MATTER

No doubt you have seen images or heard about current events in America. People have been protesting and rioting due to the killing of a black man named George Floyd. We have put together some information so you can understand this a little more and maybe understand why it is all happening. We have also set you a challenge at the end!

• Watch ‘A Kids Book About Racism’ by Jelani Memory
• Choose a story book to watch (document with QR codes)
• Read our facts behind the protests in America
• Watch our KS2 teachers setting you a challenge!
• Send us your way of spreading the message and we will put them all together

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an international group that began in 2013 with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. They are against violence and racism towards black people.They became known for their street demonstrations

Welcome to the class page for Year 4.

Well, June has arrived and hopefully the sunshine that May brought will stay with us a while longer! Thank you to all those that sent in pictures and updates of what the children in our class have been up to over the last few months. I have spoken with all the families in our class at one point or another and it seems that everyone has been coping well with lockdown. Most parents expressed that they had managed to do some work with their children but that it had been a struggle to do it on a regular basis as most of the children just felt as if the summer holidays had started early! Having said that, I think it is important that children do engage with the work made available on this page as much as possible, so that they do not lose the skills that they worked hard to gain in the months since September. The work posted here is designed to keep those skills fresh, so that children do not have to waste too much time going over old ground when they start back in...September?! As a parent myself, I understand the challenge that presents. If at all possible, please try to complete the tasks posted below with your children by June 15th - as after that point there will be lots more new work to complete and it will tend to be new skills that have not yet been taught, whereas the work below is intended to remind and reinforce what the children have already learned. There are new tasks below, but if your child has completed all the tasks then please do not hesitate to contact the school office to let me know and I will gladly post more tasks - plus I can tailor them to your child's specific ability level too. 

Best wishes,

Mr Keir Houghton

Maths ideas

June update:

Please try to complete all the tasks below this posting before completing new work - that way you can be sure your child is ready to move on. 

Multiplication and Division

Task 1:

Use a few sessions to practice bounce method by explaining it to someone in your home. Remember that bounce method helps us times and divide by ten, a hundred, thousand, ten thousand, etc.

Can you show why 165 x 10 = 1650?

What is 0.59 x 10? Can you explain why the answer is 59? Can you give an example of this in real life? You could, for example, describe buying ten things that each cost 59 pence.

What is 852 ÷ 10? Can you show why the answer is 85.2

Remember to line up your decimal points very carefully in your bounce method table. Below, 15.2 has been multiplied by ten to begin with.

Have someone test you with tricky questions to check your skills.

Task 2

Use a few sessions to practice division skills:

Look at this problem - what is 100 ÷ 3? What skills can you use to find this answer? Can you break 100 down into easier numbers and then find how many times 3 goes into those? Can you count on in threes on a number line all the way to 100 and how will that give you the answer? How many 3's go into 30? How many 30's go into 100?

Does 3 go into 100 perfectly? If not, what do we call the amount left over? Do your parents have any methods that you have not seen before? Can you understand them?

http://www.iseemaths.com/lessons34/

May update: BIG NEWS! The Guinness Book of World Records has teamed up with Times Table Rockstars to find the world's greatest times tabler! See the attached information here:

https://ttrockstars.com/page/gwr

Perimeter and area.

Do you remember that the perimeter is the lengths of each side of a shape all added together? So the perimeter of a square, if each side measured 5cm, would be 20cm - because you add up the four 5cm sides: 5cm+5cm+5cm+5cm = 20cm.

Area is quite different. Area measures the space INSIDE the shape. Take the same square with 5cm sides. If you drew this square on squared paper, as long as the squares on the paper have 1cm sides, you would be able to count 25 little squares inside the square. Try it! 

So the area of a square with 5cm sides = 25cm (and we add a tiny 2 at the end which means 'squared') - like this: 25cm²

What if the square has shorter sides? - 3cm instead for example. What is the area now?

If you draw it and then count the squares inside, you should get the answer 9 - there are 9 little squares inside.

So the area is 9cm²

Ok, so 5cm sides means the area is 25cm² and 3cm sides means the area is 9cm²

Can you see a relationship between 5 and 25 and 3 and 9?

Draw some more squares of different sizes and work out the perimeter and area. 

Is there an easier way to work out the area of a square, rather than by drawing it and counting up all the squares inside?

That's your challenge! Have a go and take some pictures while you do it to post on our page please.

Measurement

This topic is a great one for home study - there are just so many fun activities that you can do to develop your measurement skills. Baking a cake, for example, involves a number of different units of measure:

You need to weigh flour and sugar in grams.

You need to measure the cake tins in inches or centimetres.

You might need to measure some liquid using millilitres or fluid ounces.

Then of course there's the skill of setting the oven to the correct temperature and timing how long the cake mix is in the oven, using your time telling skills. You could bake an Easter chocolate cake for your family and practice your measurement skills at the same time! Remember to wash your hands very carefully before you begin and ask for help when using a hot oven. I'm making a chocolate cake - I might post some pictures if it turns out ok ha!

Here's some other measurement tasks for you:

Practice recalling that there are 10 millimetres in a centimetre.

There are 100 centimetres in a metre.

There are 1000 metres in a kilometre.

There are 1000 grams in a kilogram.

There are 10 millilitres in a centilitre.

There are 100 centilitres in a litre.

Then answer these questions:

How many grams are there in 5 kilograms?

How many millimetres in 8 centimetres?

How many metres in 14 kilometres?

How many millilitres in 6 litres?

Next: Try some to-scale conversion:

1. Measure the perimeter of a room in your house. Make sure to include any little nooks and crannies in the room.

2. Then, draw the room on a piece of paper BUT! for every metre that you measured, use 10 centimeters on your page. So, for example if the room was 4 metres wide - on your piece of paper the line showing the wall would be 40 centimetres - because 4 x 10 centimetres = 40cm.

3. Complete the room outline using this rule. You will then have a scale drawing of the room. the scale will be 1/10.

4. Let's say in the room there's a wall that measures only 60cm - less than 1 metre. Here you need your fraction skills. 60cm is roughly about half of a metre - so instead of 10cm on your paper, you would use only 5cm. See? Good luck!

English Ideas

June work

Please ensure that you have completed the tasks below before beginning this task.

If you have reached this task, well done on your hard work. You are ready to begin using your skills in an exciting written piece. Fronted adverbials are a tool that writers use to add drama and poetic tone to a story. In a fronted adverbial, the sentence begins with an exciting action-filled subordinate clause - putting the reader straight into imagining that dramatic situation. Here are some examples:

Colliding with the truck, the go kart smashed into a thousand tiny pieces that sprayed outwards in every direction.

Reeling from the force of the blow, the beast began to sway, and then finally to topple, back into the fiery pit.

Flashing with silver starlight, the dancer's shoes gave him powers that he never knew he had.

The trick is to imagine a dramatic sight, something exploding for example, and describe that first before completing the sentence. This is how a relatively boring sentence, like:

The frogs tongue shot out of his mouth and caught the fly

can be made into..

Shooting out like a long, pink, sticky bullet, the frog's tongue wrapped itself in a flash around the fly's helpless body.

Sorry, that's disgusting I know - but it's a god example I think!

Your task is to have a go yourself. Start in the first session by expanding some boring action sentences into exciting fronted adverbial sentences. In the next session, I want you to describe something like a car chase - two criminal's cars smashing through a busy market place, or maybe an asteroid smashing into a planet - whatever you like - but write six sentences to describe it, with each one a fronted adverbial sentence.

Good luck!

May work

This month, we need to practice our sentence construction. We will be looking at:

Main clauses

Subordinate clauses

Relative clauses

Subordinating conjunctions

Relative pronouns

Fronted adverbials and adverbial phrasing

Task 1:

Write three main clauses. Main clauses always have a subject and a verb. For example: Cats swim. 'Cats' are the subject, the things. 'Swim' is the verb - what the cats do. Cats and dogs is NOT a main clause as there are two subjects (Cats/dogs), but no verb. Dogs bark IS a main clause.

Task 2:

Add some detail to your main clauses. For Cats swim, you could turn this into Black cats swim quickly. Identify which types of words you have added to give more information. Black - adjective. Quickly - adverb.

Task 3:

Identify the main clause part of these sentences:

I swim before the sun comes up.

When it gets dark, you sleep.

If it is cold, people dress warmly.

Rabbits, snakes, hamsters and squirrels.

Watch out! One of the above sentences is a trick!

OK! How did you get on? Here are the answers to Task 3:

I swim.

You sleep.

People dress warmly.

...and the fourth sentence? Well, although there are the subjects: rabbits, snakes and hamsters - they're not doing anything! There's no verb, so there is not a main clause in this sentence. Did you get tricked, or did you spot it?

Right, Task 4

Subordinate clause practice

Subordinate clauses add more detail to a main clause. 

For example:

The chicken clucked, because it was angry.

The main clause is: 'The chicken clucked'. If you want to explain why it clucked, you use a subordinate clause: 'because it was angry'. 

Because is a useful word for adding more information. It's an example of what we call subordinating conjunctions. These types of words are used at the start of subordinate clauses.

Other subordinating conjunctions include:

if

although

so

but

when

after

before

as long as

If we use these with our chicken main clause, we get things like....

The chicken clucked if it was hungry.

The chicken clucked although usually it was quiet.

The chicken clucked so the dog barked.

The chicken clucked but the duck stayed calm.

The chicken clucked when the sun came up.

The chicken clucked after it had finished its dinner.

The chicken clucked before the moon rose.

The chicken clucked as long as it was happy.

Your Task - Just like I did above, create a main clause and then add more information using subordinating conjunctions and a subordinate clause. You should have eight sentences if you have used each of the eight subordinating conjunctions.

When you have done this, reflect on the different meaning in each sentence, See the effect that the different conjunctions have on the main clause. Think about how a write would use these in a story.

Task 5 - Added May 22nd 

How did you get on with your main clause and subordinate clause sentences? Ok, now we are going to add some relative clauses. A relative clause is like a subordinate clause, except that it usually explains more about the subject in the sentence.

For example:

The clown, who was famous for his juggling, entertained the crowd.

So the relative clause is 'who was famous for his juggling'. It explains more about the clown.

Here's another one:

Abigail's idea, which was the worst idea in history, was for everyone to swim across the crocodile lake.

Here, the idea is the subject of the sentence and the relative clause tells us more about it.

So, to make a relative clause:

1. Begin with 'who' if the subject is a person, or 'which' if the subject is an animal or thing.

2. After the relative conjunction who or which, add some more information.

3. Put it in the middle of your main clause, after you describe the subject.

Whew! Let's try it...

Main clause. The dog ate hungrily.

More information about the dog - it had been badly treated.

So we could have:

The dog, which had been badly treated, ate hungrily.

There you go!

Your task is now to practice this skill. 

Write six main clauses - three about some made up people and three about made up things, like cats, ideas, magic wands etc.

Then add some relative clauses using the relative conjunctions 'who' or 'which'.

Good luck!

April work

Here are the word classes we have studied so far in Year 4:

Nouns - the words that label things, such as: bike; lion; idea; puzzle; car; house; moon; thought.

Proper nouns - people or places, such as: London; Istanbul; Susan; Mrs Carver; David; America.

Adjectives - these are the describing words. They describe nouns. All the colours are adjectives, as well as words like: sulky; clever; brave; beautiful

Verbs - the action words. If you can do it, it's a verb. Ran/running/will run; danced/dancing/will dance; sang/sing/singing are all verbs, whether you have already done it, you're doing it now, or you're going to do it.

Adverbs - how something is done. Lazily, cleverly and quietly are all adverbs.

Determiners - the/a/an. These determine which noun you are talking about. The lion / a lion / an ostrich.

Prepositions - these words show how things link together. He ate before playtime. She danced under the table. You can sit next to the tree. It crawled over the floor.

1. Have someone test you on the meaning of each word - can you give a correct example for each one?

2. Write an example for each one and each example must begin with the letter t.

3. As number 2 but each word must begin with the letter a.

4. Write a sentence that contains at least one example of each word class. For example:

Horace the lazy hippo munched sleepily beneath a tree.

Can you see which words belong to which class?

My sentence contains two determiners - /the/ and /a/ and two nouns - /hippo/ and /tree/. Is it possible to write a sentence that contains just seven words, with each word being one of the seven different word classes?

UNICEF Rights of the Child.

Before our school had to close, we were learning about children's rights around the world. We discovered that there are places in the world where the rights of children are under threat; places like Syria where the war means that children are in danger everyday. If you were in charge of the world, what rights would you give children? What do you think is important? 

Look at these examples:

Chloe chose these rights:

Children should be allowed to eat whatever they want, to play video games for as long as they want to and to not have to go to school if they don't feel like it.

Rufus said this:

Every child should be given only the healthiest food because that is best for them. Children should get to choose where to go to school so that they are happy learning. Every child should be given lots of money by the government so that no child is poor. 

What do you think of Chloe's ideas? What about Rufus's? 

Write your own set of children's rights. Would you use any of Chloe and Rufus's ideas for children's rights? Try to include ten rights in your own rights charter. Once you have written it, share it with the people that you live with. Can you explain why you chose these rights? What do the people that you live with think of your rights charter?

Science

Our current topic is now MATERIALS.

Materials is all about what things are made of. Here is an activity I would like you to complete to begin the topic:

1. Ask a grownup in your house to gather six different things. Ask them to to find objects made of different materials, like plastic, paper, rock, glass, wood etc. Tell them that you will be testing them and putting them into water at some point, so it shouldn't be anything valuable or something that could be damaged by water.

2. I want you to take your six items and begin sorting them.

To separate your items you could use hula hoops, A3 paper, blankets - anything you can find to make it clear how you have separated the items. Then, once you have sorted them, take photos or do a drawing to show your sorting.

3. Ok, here are your sorting tasks:

a) Sort them by newest material to oldest material. For example, out of metal, paper, plastic and wood - which material will have been made most recently and which will be the oldest?

b) Sort them by weakest to toughest. Which of your six items is made from the strongest material and which would break the easiest? If you couldn't break any of them yourself, which would last the longest if a truck drove over them!

...and finally c) Sort them into those that float and those that do not. If none of them float - sort them by which ones sink the fastest!

REMEMBER to focus on what things are made of - NOT WHAT things are! For example, a TV is not a material - a TV is made out of a number of different materials: Plastic, glass, copper, silicon. 

Good luck!

April topic - SOUND

Remember that we discussed some sounds that we love and some that we hated? Nails on a blackboard and the sound of people eating were the least popular and the sound of rain on a window was one that people seemed to love. We also connected sound to vibration - we learned that a sound is vibrating air that makes our eardrum vibrate and then we hear the sound. We watched some short videos on BBC Bitesize to illustrate this. Remember learning that there is no sound out in the vacuum of space? It was Daniel and Jude that guessed why correctly - that there is no air in space so nothing to vibrate and make the sound - so well done to them.

Your task is to watch the BBC Bitesize Sound videos again to jog your memory. 

Then I want you to make a sound and consider how that sound enters your brain. Draw a series of pictures that show:

the making of the sound, or vibrations. The vibrating air in between the object that made the sound and your ear. Your eardrum vibrating. The connection between your eardrum and your brain that recognises the sound.

Recall that the greater force used to make the sound means bigger vibrations and louder sounds.

Can you remember what we learned about sound waves? Investigate high and low pitch sounds and their sound waves to remind yourself.

Reading

Mr P the IT genius has made a series of comprehension tasks based on songs from films!

I told you he was a genius!

Check it out here:

https://www.mrpict.com/music-for-reading-comprehension.html

BBC Bitesize Daily Lessons

I've had a look over this and it looks like a really useful resource:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/tags/z63tt39/year-4-lessons/1

Please keep in mind that some of the content may be topics that the children haven't studied yet - generally the target during Lockdown has been to revise and strengthen the children's understanding on topics that they've already covered. Please consider this if you choose to use this service.