Welcome to Year 4 and Hummingbirds.
My name is Miss Comerford and I am the class teacher of our Hummingbird Class. The wonderful Miss Watts, Mrs Akenbrook and Miss Simkins also work 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.
Our week consists of a variety of exciting lessons. We start each day with a whole school assembly, even lockdown couldn’t stop this, and we are really enjoying being able to have our assemblies altogether in the hall again!
We have Maths and English each morning. In the afternoons we explore Science, History, Geography, RE, Computing, PSHE, PE, French, Art and Music.
In Hummingbird Class we have spellings to practice every week. These help us to recognise different spelling rules and patterns.. 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. 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!
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 your learning and the learning of our classmates.
In Year 4 will be studying The Egyptians which is linked to one the books we will be looking at in English called 'The Story of Tutankhamun'. 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 also 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!
We have PE twice a week in Hummingbird class and really enjoy these lessons. Our PE days are a Monday and a Thursday and PE is in the afternoon. We come to school in our PE clothes on these day 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 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.