This year is an important one as the children will complete the Year 4 Multiplication Check which is a national test designed to assess children’s fluency in their times tables. For this reason, we expect the children to practise their times tables at home every day.
In addition to needing regular maths practice, we expect children to read at home for 30 minutes daily. They should be able to read aloud at a speed of 90-120 seconds per minute and demonstrate a good understanding of what they have read. We have a wide variety of books in school that the children are allowed to take home so they will always have plenty of reading material to practise with.
As well as focussing on embedding literacy and numeracy skills, we ensure that our children access a broad range of topics, covering all of the subjects in the National Curriculum. Trips and visits are used to support and engage children in their learning wherever possible.
By Year 4, children should be fluent readers and will therefore have moved onto our Literacy and Language programme. Those who are still at the early stage of their reading will continue to attend RWI phonics lessons.
This programme is specifically designed to build on comprehension skills learned in Year 3 and to promote a more inferential level of thinking. Children are given the outline of a text to begin with to provide them with the ‘bare bones’ of a story. They then read and study the text in depth, focusing particularly on developing a thorough understanding of the text, characters, setting and events. Once they have studied the text they then develop their writing through completing a linked writing task. Teachers model what is expected of the children in terms of their writing, and then children produce their own high quality writing.
In addition to this, the children follow spelling and grammar schemes which will cover an increasing range of word and sentence types, and punctuation.
Maths lessons in Year 4 are taught using a maths mastery approach which builds upon and continues the learning from previous years. We support our teaching and learning of maths through the use of Effective Maths (see link below), which is a comprehensive framework for teaching high quality maths.
We ensure that our school curriculum is in line with the National Curriculum, which you can see here: National Curriculum