Welcome to Year 4

Class Teachers

Pine: Miss Owen

Oak: Mrs Southgate

Support Staff: 

Miss Adams (HLTA)

Miss Lewis (LSA)

Key Messages/Dates

• P.E is on a Friday (Please come in the correct kit!)

Autumn 1

Autumn 2

• Tuesday 17th November 2026 - The Players Theatre 

What are we learning in Year 4 this term?

Reading

These are the texts that we cover throughout the year:

At St Margaret's we are passionate about reading! We teach daily reading session based on a Curriculum for Unity School's Partnership (CUSP) text.

This term, our core text is 'The Girl Who Stole an Elephant' by Nizrana Farook

'The Girl Who Stole an Elephant' is an exciting adventure story about a brave girl called Chaya, who lives in Sri Lanka. Chaya does not have much money, but she always tries to help others and do the right thing. When she steals the Queen's jewels, she has to run away to stay out of trouble.

On her journey, she meets a kind boy called Neel and an elephant named Tembo. Together, they travel through the jungle, face lots of challenges and have many exciting adventures. Along the way, they learn about friendship, courage and helping other people. 

The core texts are supplemented by a variety of additional texts, to support children developing their reading fluency and confidence across a range of text types.

Writing

At St Margaret's Primary Academy we follow CUSP for our writing curriculum. The CUSP curriculum is a vocabulary rich, knowledge based approach to help develop pupils' retrieval, vocabulary and deepen learning. During the Autumn term, Year 4 will be looking at the following:

Third Person Adventure Stories

This term, the children will be writing their own exciting adventure stories. They will learn how to make their writing more interesting by using fronted adverbials, choosing the correct tense, and adding descriptive language such as similes, expanded noun phrases and powerful verbs. The children will also practise punctuating speech correctly when characters are talking.

Exploring Narrative Poetry

This term, the children will be studying a narrative poem. They will learn how stories can be told through poetry and will develop their skills in understanding a third-person narrator, identifying different poetic techniques, and finding evidence from the poem to support their ideas.

News Reports

This term, the children will become journalists and write their own news reports. They will learn how to write in a formal style, include quotes from witnesses, write in the third person, and organise their reports clearly so that they are informative and engaging for readers.

Maths

At St Margaret's Primary Academy we adopt a Mastery approach to teach maths lessons. The mastery approach supports children in becoming fluent and confident mathematicians. Maths lessons include ‘Foundational Skills’ where children recap previously learnt skills.

This term we will be looking at:

• Area

• Multiplication and Division

During these units, pupils will use a variety of concrete resources and pictorial representations to move toward abstract mathematical concepts. We focus heavily on mathematical talk and reasoning, ensuring children can explain how they reached an answer, not just that they found the correct one. Children will also have the opportunity to practice and develop their times table knowledge daily. 

Multiplication Table Check (MTC)

The Multiplication Tables Check (MTC) is a mandatory assessment for Year 4 pupils, designed to evaluate their fluency in multiplication tables up to 12x12. This assessment is completed online in a similar nature to soundcheck on TTRS. The MTC aims to ensure that students have a strong grasp of basic multiplication facts, which is crucial to their mathematical development.

Science 

This half term in Science, we will be learning about states of matter. The children will investigate solids, liquids and gases, and discover how materials can change from one state to another through a range of practical activities and investigations.

During this topic, we will explore the following questions:

• What is matter?
• What does the word state mean?
• What are solids, liquids and gases?
• How do materials change when they melt?
• How do materials change when they evaporate?
• How do materials change when they condense?
• How can materials change between different states of matter?

PSHE

This half term, children will work through the Jigsaw unit 'Being Me In My World'

Home Learning

We expect children to read a minimum of three times a week at home.

Children are expected to practise their times tables at home regularly using Times Tables Rock Stars (TTRS) https://ttrockstars.com/ 

If you need support with logging into either services or are unaware of your child's login, please reach out to a member of the Year 4 team.