Year 4 Staff

World Book Day 2022!

Everyone in Queen Edith celebrated World Book Day with a whole week of events! Each year group read ‘We’re All Wonders’ written by R J Palacio.

We’re All Wonders is a text for younger readers based on Wonder and shows what it’s like to live in Auggie’s world – a world in which he feels like any other kid, but he’s not always seen that way. We discussed themes of belonging, being seen, empathy, difference and kindness. Each year group had a project that they carried out linked to this text.

Nursery painted beautiful self-portraits with the title We’re All Wonders.

Reception children wrote individual letters to Mrs Jarman telling her how they are all special.

In Years 1 & 2, children used the text to inspire them and wrote their own recipes for kindness, to create a kind person 

In Year 3, they wrote a letter from Auggie to his friends on Pluto, exploring his experiences and feelings. They started when people were mean to him, then looked at visiting Pluto, to making his first friend who saw him as a wonder.

Year 4 created a diary entry, empathising with the main character of August, revealing his emotions both before and after his first day of school. They also wrote a letter to the Plutonians to show how Auggie was feeling after making new friends.

In Later Years, pupils used both We’re All Wonders and the original story of Wonder to look at inferences within reading, family dynamics, anti-bullying targets, emotive language and diary entries. We chose one of the children from Auggie’s school tour and wrote as one of them, framing our writing from a different perspective, not that of the protagonist. Some chose Julian, the school bully; Charlotte, the friendly but self-obsessed drama fanatic, or Jack Will, the friendly boy who sees with kindness and becomes Auggie’s best friend.

Our Book Fair was a huge success with us receiving ‘rewards’ per class for books to choose for our book shelves and also ‘rewards’ for us to spend on widening our representation of texts. Thank you to all who bought books and, in turn, supported the school!

Writing – Spring 2022

Year 4 have been exploring how useful it is to peer and team edit their writing work. It allows them to dig deeper into their texts and spot errors as well as notice areas to improve.

They are enjoying this process and spotting how it can lift the quality of their written work.

Electricity – Spring 2022

Year 4 have been enjoying their Electricity topic. They have learned to make a complete circuit with bulbs, buzzers and switches. They have also discovered a range of conductors and insulators and are now able to predict from drawings alone whether circuits will work at all. You could say this topic was a light bulb moment!

Writing Play Scripts – Autumn 2021

In Year 4, we have enjoyed writing play scripts and then performing them! We found out that the structure is quite tricky but we felt happy with it in the end. We also found out that if you write clear and detailed stage directions, the performers will understand where to go and which props to take with them on stage. It is also interesting that this kind of speech doesn’t need speech marks. We used so many adverbs so we could describe how the dialogue should be spoken. E.g. proudly, quietly, loudly etc.  Basically, the better the script, the better the performance really!