Login


Year 4 - Hummingbirds

Mrs Dani Read

The Hummingbirds team is made up of Mrs Dani Read (Monday- Thursday) and Mrs Foxall who teaches on a Friday. The wonderful Mrs Francis also works with our class to help us with our learning. In Hummingbird Class we love to learn and enjoy having fun while we’re at it. We work hard in all of our learning and enjoy working with each other in a kind and caring learning environment. We have the same 3 rules throughout the school which makes it easy for us to follow them. They are: Keep safe, Use your Values and Be the best that you can be" We learn about and practice these rules every day.

Mrs Nicky Foxall
Our Daily Routine
 

Our week consists of a variety of exciting lessons and activities.  Routine is key and the children are able to see what the day will hold, on our visual timetable.  We start each day with a whole school assembly, before lessons begin.

Maths and English are taught each morning, whereas the afternoons are dedicated to Science, History, Geography, RE, Computing, PSHE, PE, French, Art, DT and Music, sometimes in different half terms. 

Our day is punctuated with regular movement and mindfulness breaks: keeping our brains healthy and recharged is just as important if we are to learn well!

 

 
Key Skills are Important
 

In Hummingbird Class we explore spelling rules and patterns each week. These help us to become independent spellers and to produce writing of a higher quality.  We also have a times table focus each half term to develop our fluency of the multiplication facts up to the 12 times table in preparation for the times table check in Year 4. We learn each times table in order, out of order and then the matching division fact to help us develop a strong understanding of these mathematical facts. Reading is another key skill and we aim to read every day.  Hummingbirds are a competitive bunch and we aim to win the half termly school reading competition each time!  We really enjoy echo reading as a class, where the teacher reads a sentence and then we read it back. It really helps us to hear how the teacher uses her voice in different sentences and we like discussing interesting words and phrases too. In Year 4, we will also start to have some homework to get us ready for middle school! 

 
We believe in the power of Growth mindset
 

In Hummingbird Class we continue to develop our understanding of the 5 R’s – Resilience, Reasoning, Responsibility, Resourceful, Reflective - and how they help us to use the power of a growth mindset. We know that mistakes help us to learn and use resilience to overcome challenges. We try to be resourceful learners, using what we know to help us solve problems as well as taking responsibility for our learning and the learning of our classmates.  Most importantly, we learn that making mistakes is an essential and unavoidable step towards learning and improving ourselves.  ‘We love mistakes’ is one of our class rules!

 
Our Year Ahead
 

In Year 4 will be studying the impact the ancient Romans had on Britain.  We will also be exploring Ancient Greece and comparing what we learn to other cultures and time periods.  We will be learning about electricity in Science, learning about circuits as well as continuing to develop our knowledge of plants and animals including humans and their habitats. We are especially looking forward to our residential trip to Grafham Water where we will be having a go at lots of exciting activities on and off the water! And this year sees the return of our Young Voices trip where the children have the opportunity to sing as a large school choir at the O2!

 
How we keep our bodies and minds fit and healthy
 

We have PE twice a week in Hummingbird class and really enjoy these lessons. Our PE days are a Thursday and a Friday. We come to school in our PE clothes on these days and have to remember to wear the appropriate kit for the weather: jumpers, joggers and hats in the winter and shorts and t-shirts in the summer. 

We also like to include some fitness into every day. This could be a daily mile on the playground outside or a Go noodle in the classroom. We all love to have dance to some music! To keep our minds healthy, we have a weekly PSHE lesson which allows us to talk about a variety of different topics as a class. We also have a weekly well-being assembly as a whole school where we get to share ideas with the rest of the school too. We also aim to have a mindful moment each day too. This could be by listening to a piece of calming music or looking at an interesting picture for a few moments.