The Year Four Team

Online Advent Calendar

As Advent begins this Sunday with Advent Sunday celebrated in Churches, we would like to share this online Advent Calendar with you, produced by the Diocese of Guildford. It explores the Christmas story through Christian artwork, investigating a different artist and aspect of the story throughout the term time days of Advent. Please enjoy sharing this with your family as we prepare for Christmas in school and at home.

Curriculum Overview

This Week in Surrey

Week beginning 15th December 

Surrey has been full of festive cheer this week!

Tinsel, baubles and carols have filled the room! After a wonderful two performances last week, the children have enjoyed the countdown to the end of term. Thank you to all adults for their support in costumes, learning lines and coming too watch the play. 

In Maths we have been continuing to build on our addition and subtraction skills by looking at how to represent word problems as bar models. Alongside this we have been focusing on our multiplication, embedding those facts already learnt and building on these. Please continue to support your child at home on learning multiplication tables. 

In English we used dice to write a narrative in a technique called, 'Roll-a-story', letting chance decide the setting, characters and details. This allowed us to recap a range of writing devices, e.g. fronted adverbials, subordinating conjunctions and inverted commas for speech. Some were rather amusing!

Have a wonderful break everyone!

Miss Towler, Mr Nunn, Mrs Cheesman  

Class Timetable

This is an example timetable of what a typical week in Surrey will look like.

PE is on Tuesday and Wednesday this term.

Home Learning

Spellings will be set on a Wednesday and tested the following Tuesday each week. Our next spelling test will be on Tuesday 16th December 2025.

The link below will take you to the spelling scheme we are working from in school.

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/english/primary-spelling/

This document contains spelling strategies that are used in class, and can be used at home to aid learning new words:

Southborough's Spelling Strategies

Weekly investigative task

All of the children will have an investigative topic-linked learning task to complete, which is rotated over a three-week cycle. The children will focus on one of their three current foundation subjects each week.
To support this, the children are split into 3 groups.
This will be set on a Thursday and due by the following Tuesday.

In class on a Tuesday or Wednesday, the children will then share the outcomes of their research, and the knowledge they have retrieved, within their own group.

Please see investigative task and groups in attached document below. 

Maths strategies

Please see below attachments for examples from White Rose Maths including the four operations, (add, subtract, multiply, divide) and how we extend learning using reasoning style questions. 

In preparation for the national multiplication check in June 2026, the children have begun to use the link below. 

Times Tables Rockstars! 

To keep practising the multiplication taught in class, and challenging yourself to keep the ones you already know fresh, don’t forget to log into your Times Tables Rockstars account. 

https://play.ttrockstars.com/

Challenge yourself to beat your score and build your knowledge as you become a Rockstar!

Please ask your class teacher if you need replacement log in details.

This week we are focusing on the multiplication tables for x3, x6 and x9.

If you know them well, maybe challenge yourself with the corresponding division facts. For example:

6 x 7 = 42

42 ÷ 6 = 7

Reading

Children should bring their Accelerated Reading Book to and from school each day. When they have finished reading, children are asked to complete a quiz before changing their book. 

https://global-zone61.renaissance-go.com/welcomeportal/6704864

Parents please log your child's reading on the BOOM reader Parent Portal or by using the BOOM reader parent app on your tablet/mobile no more than once a week.

boomreader.co.uk/parents

Spelling

Below is a list of the 100 most common words that your child is expected to know how to spell by the end of Year 4 (please see attachment).

The spelling strategies document below shows what strategies are used in class, and can be used at home to aid learning new words: 

Music Knowledge Organiser