Our Learning

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PE days – Tuesday and Friday

Library day - Thursday

 

Topic

Our topic this term is ‘Explore Romans’ and the children will be developing their knowledge and understanding of British History with a focus on The Roman Empire and its impact on Britain at the time and the legacy it left us, focusing on things that the Romans brought to Britain as well as how the Celtic population in Britain at the time responded to the Roman invasions. We will start by learning about how Rome was founded and then will go onto exploring the Roman Empire, where and how the Roman Army conquered other countries and Roman daily life

 

Maths

We will begin the term working on place value. The children will have the opportunity to explore and use a variety of representations (including measures) to become fluent in the order and place value of numbers beyond 1,000, including counting in 10s and 100s We will then move on to addition and subtraction with numbers up to 4-digits using the formal methods of column addition and subtraction where possible. We will then look at area, thinking about counting squares, making shapes and comparing area before moving on to focusing on multiplication and division. During this time, the children will continue to practise recalling and using multiplication tables and related division facts to aid fluency, practise mental methods and become fluent in the formal written method of short multiplication and short division.

Problem solving and reasoning will continue to be an important part of all our maths when the children are encouraged to apply their knowledge and skills independently and to persevere when they are stuck.

We need to be secure in all our times tables by the end of year 4. This term will be spent revisiting those learnt in year 2 and 3 (2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 8x and 10x) initially before moving on to the remaining ones. These will become part of our daily routine to practise so that the children are able to instantly recall facts.

 

English

We have begun reading our class novel ‘Roman Boy’ by Tony Bradman. This book will be our focus over the next few weeks as we build up to writing a historical narrative. We have started focusing on how the author creates images in the readers mind through description and we will be writing our own descriptive sentences exploring settings and character’s feelings. As we get further into the book we will be thinking about how similes and metaphors are used to create powerful images in the reader’s mind.

 

Using what we have learnt, we will continue focusing on imagery and creating images in the readers mind when we explore poetry. We will focus on ‘I am a Roman Soldier’ by Joasiah Wedgewood and look at the structure of his poem to use as a basis for our own. We will be using determiners, prepositions, adverbials and expanded noun phrases in our work.

 

As the children begin to understand The Roman Empire and its impact on Britain, we will use ‘Roman Diary, The Journal of Iliona a young slave’ by Richard Platt to create a writing opportunity as they imagine themselves to be a Roman slave for a week. They will be encouraged to think about time adverbials, comparative conjunctions and rhetorical questions. They will write effective sentences for a historical diary which will draw the reader in to their inner thoughts and feelings.

 

 

As we progress throughout the term we will continue to use our topic to inspire our non-fiction writing as well as our fictional writing. We will be writing a biography on Boudicca as we learn about how she led the

 

Iceni tribe into battle against the Roman’s in Britain. The children will be encouraged to identify the key features of biographies before incorporating these into their own work.