Year 4 – Autumn Newsletter 2025

Dear Parents/Carers

Welcome to Year 4! I hope you all had a lovely summer break. I am really looking forward to working with you and your children this year.

English

As the children grow in independence and maturity in their reading and writing, we will be supporting them to develop their own voices, discussing and highlighting the options available to them, both stylistically and in their choices of vocabulary. We will be encouraging self-assessment to develop the children’s awareness of detail, particularly in spelling and punctuation and we will be discussing the texts we read in class, expressing our own ideas and responses and justifying these with evidence found within the texts.

We will begin this half-term by exploring two exciting texts. The Baker by the Sea by Paula White and where children will be able to immerse themselves in the life of a seaside community. They will use inspiration to create a range of writing, including tourist brochures, job applications, advertisements and setting descriptions. Later in the term we will move on to Shakleton’s Journey by William Grill, following the incredible Antarctic expedition. From this, the children will take on different roles to produce newspaper reports, letters, interviews and diary entries, to enable their development in their ability to write for a variety of purposes and audiences.

Grammar includes punctuating speech, conjunctions for time and cause, fronted adverbials, conjunctions, adverbs to express time and cause, prepositions to express time, place and cause, expanded noun phrases and the present form of verbs in contrast to the past tense.

We will continue to follow the spellings programme and will be asking the children to practice these at home as well as at school, familiarising themselves with the spelling words and noting their use within texts.

Maths

This term we will be building on knowledge of place value of 3-and 4-digit numbers including partitioning, rounding, ordering and comparing. We will then be moving on to addition and subtraction, including written method with exchanges. We will begin using strategies to check our answers. We will learn about area, perimeter and units of measure for length, before moving onto multiplication and division by 10 and 100. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, we will be focusing on the 6,7 and 9 times tables. It would therefore be very beneficial to learn and consolidate the 2,5,10,3,4 and 8 times tables in the first half of this term and the weeks leading up to this.

At home, it would be helpful if you practiced telling the time on both analogue and digital clocks with continued practice of the times tables and related division facts. This will also help to prepare children for the times table test later in the year.

Science

For the first half term, we are studying electricity, including learning about conductors and insulators, creating circuits and electrical safety. We will then learn about sound.

Topic: Victorians (History/Geography)

We will explore the life of Queen Victoria as well as which famous inventions originated in the Victorian era and how they changed people’s lives at the time. We will find out what the Industrial Revolution was and how Victorian Britain was changed by it and how the introduction of the railways changed travel and trade. We will explore what life was like for Victorian working children and why Lord Shaftesbury was an important figure, including how rules about who could go to school changed. We will use historical sources to make observations about Victorian clothing and toys, comparing these to today. We will also be learning about what life was like for families in the workhouses.

French

We will begin learning about food in a topic entitled “Le Café”, where we will learn to order food in a café. We will also begin to learn vocabulary for animals and talk about the pets we own, as well as basic vocabulary, phrases and numbers.

Computing

In computing we will begin the year by thinking about online safety.  We will then be looking at and creating our own blogs!

Art and DT

In art the children will be focusing on William Morris, where we will be printing patterns and Marriane North, where we will be looking at flowers in observational detail.

RE

This year we will be continuing to follow our RE scheme of learning, which centres around three areas: Theology, Philosophy and Human and Social Sciences, with each lesson starting with an enquiry question. We will be learning about a range of religions including Christianity, Sikhism and Hinduism.

PSHE

We will be focusing on wellbeing and mindfulness, while also learning about safe relationships, personal boundaries, safely responding to others and the impact of hurtful behaviour.

Respecting Ourselves and Others, by recognising respectful behaviour, the importance of self-respect and courtesy & being polite.

Music

This term we are fortunate enough to have music lessons through the ‘Charanga’ scheme provided by Essex music services. We will be listening to and appraising songs of different genres, as well as composing our own music in the same style. We will continue to learn to play the recorder.

PE

This term’s allocated PE slots are Thursday and Friday. However, children will need to have their kits in school at all times as these may change unexpectedly and we may be fortunate enough to have additional PE time. We will begin the term with fitness and football.

Homework and how you can support your child’s learning

It is greatly beneficial to your child’s learning for you to hear them read whenever possible. Please encourage your child to sample a wide range of text types and support their interest in reading by discussing what they have read and by continuing to share texts together when possible. Reading aloud has been shown to be hugely beneficial, even as the children’s independent reading ability grows, so please maintain this where possible. Please do not hesitate to contact me (via the office) if you have any particular concerns you would like to discuss.

Along with listening to your child read, the children will be set spellings to learn each week. Six sets of spellings will be issued for the half term and tests will take place every Friday; please assist them to learn these words. If they are difficult, break the words down to 2/3 word per day. If they are more confident with the given words, practice writing them in a dictated sentence.

Maths, English, Science or topic homework will be set on Fridays for return the following Thursday. Tasks are set in order to support and consolidate the learning taking place in class. Please support your child to ensure they fully understand what has been asked of them. If there is any confusion, or your child is having trouble with the homework, please let me know (preferably before Thursday) so I can help them.

As per a recent ParentMail, we will be moving our homework to Teams and we anticipate that homework and spellings will be set up by Friday 12^th September.  I will communicate with you should it be the following week.

Times Tables- It is SO important all children are practising their times tables. This should be done a minimum of 5 times a week. They should be valued in the same way as all homework activities. If Timestable rockstars does not suit your learning style, please learn them in an alternative way.  Do ask if you need help with this.

Water/Snacks

Children must bring in a bottle of water, and a snack for break time each day. It is often a long time between breakfast and lunch and a snack is important to keep us all going. We ask that these are healthy, in line with our Healthy Schools ethos (fruit or vegetables only).

Other

Please ensure all items of clothes are labelled. It is so much easier to ensure children take home the correct uniform when it is named.

Dates

If you have any questions or concerns at any time, please email me via the office and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Kind regards

Mrs Bond