Welcome to this week's Year 4 blog.

Firstly, let's congratulate Carly on being this week's winner of our class certificate. She really has worked hard this week on improving her handwriting and presentation of her wor. Keep it up, Carly!

In English this week, we have been building on our work from previous weeks around `Voices’ and developing the vital reading skill of inference.  On Monday, we watched Road’s End, a short video clip that told the story of 2 characters; a man in a red scarf and the driver of a car.  We paused the clip at certain points and used predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarising to develop our understanding. This generated interesting discussions amongst the whole class. From this we collected vocabulary which we used to create a character profile.

We focused particularly on the driver of the car, his actions and interactions alongside his choice of the spoken word to inform us about how he was feeling and thinking. 

Why not take a look at the animation below and see for yourself.

On Tuesday, we wrote an account of the car journey focusing on the details that we had found in the animation.  We used the idea from last week's English, 'Voice in the Park', to write in the first person as though we were the driver. We did a first draft and then improved it through editing and sharing examples of successful writing (thanks Letitia).

We even had a competition to 'Beat the Teacher!' We worked in a group to try and list as many verbs as we could about the driver. Miss Whittle has 50 verbs! That'll take some beating, but we like a challenge in our class!

Easy peasy?

Do all shapes have the same number of lines of symmetry?How about finding the lines of symmetry in these shapes to investigate this?

Done it? What do you notice about the lines of symmetry? 

Why not try out some of these symmetry activities from the Top Marks website?

Play here

In Science, we have been looking at the 5 groups we can classify vertebrates into.  Did you know that a vertebrate is an animal that has a spine or backbone?

Can you name the 5 groups?

They are called mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Now, can you identify the definition for each group? (Some of us in 4W achieved our KPI for using a dictionary in this lesson!)

Want to know more? Then why not play this online game to check how well you know your vertebrates?

Play here.

Please do try to support our School Choir Coffee Morning on Wednesday.  Check out the details below. We would really love you to join us.

Finally, have your say.  Each week you will have a chance to decide on which new song we will learn in next week's whole school assembly.  Click on the link below to take part in an online vote. (Note -this is carried from last week's choices.)