Year 4 Curriculum

Please click on the links below to view the Manor Hill Curriculum Units for Year 4

	Autumn Term	Spring Term	Summer Term
Year 4	Y4 From Stone to Steel	Y4 Tomb-Tastic	Y4 Here we are

English

Reading

Reading Comprehension

• Reading fluently is increasingly important however understanding what your child is reading is also very important.
• Children in Year 4 may listen to and discuss a variety of stories, non-fiction texts, poetry, plays and textbooks in order to understand that texts are structured in different ways and written for different purposes.
• Year 4 children should be encouraged to use a dictionary to understand meaning of words they don’t know.
• Children might be expected to retell traditional and fairy stories, also myths or fables, in detail. They may also work on writing poems and plays to read aloud and perform using the correct intonation and volume.
• When reading poetry, children will be encouraged to recognise different types of poetry, e.g tongue twisters or riddles.
• As well as understanding books they listen to, children will hopefully be understanding books they can read independently by checking that their reading makes sense, asking questions, inferring character feelings, thoughts and actions and justifying with evidence, making predictions and summarising the main ideas within a section of text. Inference involves using the clues in the story or picture to make a good guess.
• It involves figuring something out which isn’t fully explained and draws on a child’s existing knowledge of the world.
• Children will also be encouraged to look back in the text so they can find the answer to a question.

Writing and Spelling

• Your child may learn to use a wide range of prefixes (a group of letters added to the beginning of a word to change its meaning) such as in-, re-, sub-, dis- and mis- and suffixes (a letter or group of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning) such as –ation and –ous.
• In addition to this, children in Year 4 may also learn how to spell a wider range of homophones (words which sound the same but are spelt differently such as hear/here, some/sum)
• Children will also be able to place the possessive apostrophe in the right place (e.g the lady’s bag, Lewis’ jumper).

Handwriting

• Generally, children in Year 4 will continue to work on joining letters together so that they are always joining up their handwriting. Emphasis should be on the quality and consistency of the handwriting.

Writing – Composition

• Planning writing – In order to fully understand the structure and style of the text that they are writing in, they may be exposed to different texts of that type.
• Drafting and writing – Year 4 Children may practise planning the sentences in their heads before writing them down, consciously including an interesting range of vocabulary.
• Children might also learn how to write in paragraphs and structure content well including all the necessary features of that writing style.
• Evaluate and edit – Children will be encouraged to regularly assess the effectiveness of their own and other’s writing, suggesting improvements and proof reading for grammar, spelling or punctuation errors.
• Children will keep in mind the level they are writing at and what they can do to achieve the next level.
• Finally, children will be taught how to use intonation when reading their writing out loud and vary the volume so what they are reading is clearly heard.

Writing – Vocabulary, Grammar and Punctuation

• In Year 4, your child may work on ironing out any Standard English mistakes such as ‘I were’ instead of ‘I was’, ‘I did’ instead of ‘I have done’ and using apostrophes to mark plural possession, e.g. the boy’s bag (one boy and his bag) and the boys’ bags (the bags belonging to the group of boys).
• Your child may be encouraged to describe nouns with additional adjectives and prepositional phrases (telling of where, when, or why things happen).
• Children may also be encouraged to be using adverbial phrases to begin sentences. These act like adverbs telling you when, where or how often something happens and are always followed by a comma, e.g. ‘At school,…’, ‘Slowly,….’ and ‘Later that evening,…’.
• Children may work on using paragraphs accurately (begin a new paragraph when introducing a new character, section of a story or new information) and secure the punctuating of direct speech correctly (including an appropriate piece of punctuation before closing the speech marks).
• Your child may be encouraged to use more of a variety of tenses in their writing, such as the present perfect form rather than just the past tense. The present perfect is simply formed using the past tense of the verb ‘to have’, e.g He has been living there since 2008, They’ve finished their work and She’s gone on her own to the concert.
• Finally, Year 4 is a time for greater range of vocabulary, including a wider range of conjunctions to join sentences – when, if, although, however, although.

Maths

Number – Number and Place Value (Thousands, Hundreds, Tens and Ones)

• Your child may learn to count in jumps of 6, 7, 9, 25 and 1000 and practise finding 1000 more or less than another number having understood the place value of each digit of a four digit number.
• They might work on making estimations and round numbers to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000.
• Children will solve problems involving these larger numbers and learn to read Roman numerals to 100, understanding that over time, our number system changed and included zero and place value.
• Your child might also practise ordering and comparing numbers beyond 1000

Measurement

• Children might learn how to convert between different units of measure, e.g. hours into minutes, kilograms into grams.
• They may also learn how to work out the perimeter (the distance around the shape) in both cm and m. Your child may also learn about how to find the area of a shape this year.
• Estimating and comparing different measures may be another focus this year e.g. How much does this parcel weigh in grams/kilograms? or How many ml of liquid is there in this container? Which is longer, 300 seconds or 2 minutes?
• Converting between analogue (clock with hands) and digital 12 and 24 clock might also be practised this year, e.g. quarter past 6 in the afternoon – 18:15.

Geometry – Properties of Shape

• In Year 4, children are likely to focus on looking for lines of symmetry in shapes in different orientations (different positions) and complete a shape or picture with one line of symmetry.
• Your child may work on comparing and naming different quadrilaterals (four sided shape with four straight sides including parallelograms, trapezium and rhombus) and triangles (including acute, obtuse, right angled, equilateral, isosceles and scalene).
• Children will be taught to spot and compare different angles using a protractor including acute angles (less than 90 degrees) and obtuse angles (more than 90 degrees).

Geometry – Position and Direction

• Your child may describe positions on a grid, e.g (2 , 5) and (4 , 7).
• The phrase ‘Along the corridor and up the stairs’ is a great way of remembering to take the x axis reference before taking the y reference.

Statistics

• Children might learn to present their data in bar charts and line graphs, interpreting the data in different ways such as finding differences, totalling and making comparisons.

Science

Working Scientifically

• Science is a great way to find out about the world around us.
• Your child will be encouraged to raise questions, set up fair tests, make careful observations and take readings.
• Your child will then decide how to best present their data clearly, report on their findings and draw conclusions based on their initial question.
• All of the following topics are taught through the ‘working scientifically’ science strand.

States of Matter

• In Year 4, your child may learn about solids, liquids and gases and investigate changing state due to cooling or heating, measuring temperature in °C.
• It is likely that children will also learn about the water cycle, specifically focusing on evaporation (liquid to vapour/gas) and condensation (vapour/gas back to a liquid), linking the rate of evaporation to temperature.

Living things and their habitats

• Your child will be taught and practise how to group living things into the following categories of flowering plants, non-flowering plants, vertebrates: reptiles, birds, mammals, amphibians and fish and invertebrates (creatures without backbones): worms, spiders, insects, slugs and snails.
• In Year 4, children can also learn about human impact on environments, both positive and negative, and how this can affect a habitat.

Electricity

• Children might learn to spot common household appliances which work using electricity, make up a simple circuit, recognise the purpose of a switch and investigate whether a lamp will light or not depending on its position within the circuit.
• Finally, children might test different conductors (conduct the electricity) and insulators within the circuit.

Sound

• Children in Year 4 may learn how sound is made and how we hear. Children may also investigate pitch, volume and sound sources.