Year 4 English
Autumn
In the first half of the autumn term our work will be based around a book called Mr Penguin and the Lost Treasure by Alex T Smith. The children will use this as a basis to write their own ‘Quest’ story focusing on using expanded noun phrases and starting their sentences in different ways by using fronted adverbials. They will also look in detail at speech punctuation. To follow on from this, they will look at a non-fiction text about emperor penguins which will be used to inspire their own non-chronological reports about a penguin of their choice. They will use their research skills to find out information and then focus on organising their ideas into relevant paragraphs. After half term, our work will be centred around a short film called ‘Soar’. They will develop their use of conjunctions as a way of extending and expanding their ideas, and developing their use of word choices to engage the reader. They will also study biographies of famous people from aviation history.
Spring
During this term, our work will be based around the Ancient Greeks. Children will look at Traditional Tales (using Greek Myths) and newspaper reports. They will focus on trying to vary the sentence types they use in their writing, and create and expand characters. In the second half of the term, the children will be focusing on developing the style of their non-fiction writing based on the Amazon Rainforest, using The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry as our basis. They will write a non-chronological report about a chosen animal from the rainforest. We will then focus on deforestation and how we can help with this problem in school, writing persuasive letters. They will continue to develop their use of a wider range of conjunctions and sentence lengths in order to extend their use of different sentence styles. Children will also learn about the plural possessive apostrophe.
Summer
In the final term, our work will be centred short film called ‘Lighthouse’. The children will concentrate on developing their description of character and setting as they write their own Rags to Riches stories. The children will also learn about the use of continuous and perfect forms of verbs in the past and present tense. When studying poetry, the children will learn to use figurative language such as similes, metaphors, hyperbole and personification for affect. After half term, our topic will be The Romans and we will focus our writing on a warning story called ‘Escape from Pompeii’. We will also write instructions based around surviving a volcanic eruption. These units are flexible, depending on the needs of the children and whether any writing skills taught earlier in the year need further consolidation.
