St. Augustine's Catholic Primary School

Dear Parents,

We have started off our 'Were the Dark Ages dark?' topic this week. We began by learning about Sutton Hoo and the incredible items found there. We then learnt how to write using the runic alphabets and then made our own rune pebbles which we will later decorate. As it has been multi-faith week at St Augustine's we have been exploring Judaism. We learnt about the books of the Torah and how sacred these writings are to Jewish people. To continue our theme of writing in new languages to us, we learnt our own names in Hebrew and tried very hard to remember that we need to read and write it from right to left.

The children have made a brilliant start with their learning about addition and subtraction of 4-digit numbers, they are building wonderfully on their knowledge from previous years. I have included the National Curriculum objectives below to help you see what your child will be learning. Our calculations policy is on the website if you want to know how we teach addition and subtraction in year 4 - it can sometimes be very different to what we were taught when we were at school ourselves. 

•  Add and subtract numbers with up to 4 digits using formal written methods of columnar addition and subtraction where appropriate.
• Estimate and use inverse operations to check answers to a calculation.
• Solve addition and subtraction two step problems in contexts, deciding which operations and methods to use and why.

•   https://www.topmarks.co.uk/
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/z826n39
• https://nrich.maths.org/9084

We have started our PE learning, which takes place on a Tuesday and Thursday, can I please remind everyone that full PE kits must be in school on those days to ensure your child can take part easily? Also - a reminder of our school policy on earrings. Should your child wear earrings they will need to be able to remove them themselves to participate in PE. If they are unable to do so, please ensure they are removed on days we are doing PE.

It has been wonderful to see so many of the children reading at home, regular reading with an adult makes such a different to their confidence, understanding and vocabulary (please continue to make a note of this in their reading journal). Your child will now have record of both their Times Tables Rockstars and DB Primary login in their reading journal.  

Have a great weekend!

Amy Neale