Highlights from Year 4

We have been looking at Fantasy stories this term and how to write our own description settings of a fantasy story. We explored our text by creating our own story maps looking at relevant details describing our settings.

For our SPAG week we looked at relative clauses, fronted adverbials, descriptive adjectives and expanding sentences by adding more adverbs and information to help us with our write up. We enjoyed writing detailed settings for our fantasy stories. Have a look at some of our work.

This term we looked at Electricity. We investigated different circuits and their different components. We looked closely at different circuits that have been connected differently and had to predict whether they would light up a bulb. There was great discussion around which parts of the components would be necessary in order for this to work and which components won't light the bulb if they were not placed on the circuit correctly. We particularly enjoyed our lesson on conductors and insulators. We had to predict, from the objects on the table, whether they were able to conduct electricity or not. We loved testing this out!

We were inspired to create impressionist Art like Claude Monet this term. Impressionism is a movement of painting that originated from France in the 1860’s, showing the impression of the moment, time of day or seasons. We looked at the differences between impressionist art and other styles of art. One of Monet's painting skills was the use of mixing colours and his brush stroke techniques which we practiced this term; this included practicing how to create different shades to create mood, the time of the day or seasons. We will be creating our final impressionist art using acrylic paint, broccoli and flowers to create our landscapes. Look out for us on Ranikhet Twitter!

We've enjoyed another exciting unit in Geography looking at volcanoes! We explored where we can find famous volcanoes all over the world using our atlases. Did you know that the Mt Vesuvius is found in Italy near a city called Naples? It is 1281 meters in height and about 17000 years old. This is the closest volcano to England and is also known as the most dangerous. We also explored what happens when a volcano erupts and discussed what type of issues people might face living near a volcano. At the end of the unit, we will be creating our own explosive volcanoes!