Literacy

 

During Literacy, we have read our final class text and continued to explore different genres of writing. We used our knowledge from our history and geography topics this term to write about relevant issues across the world. We wrote a letter to the British Museum saying whether we thought the Benin artefacts should be returned or not. Finally, year 4 completed their trips to Plaistow Library and have begun the Summer Reading Challenge!

 

 

Maths

This term in maths, we have been learning about co-ordinates and money. We looked at grids with four quadrants for the first time and learnt that the steps stay the same, even if the grid looks different. We recapped what we learnt about money from Year 3 including adding and subtracting amounts of money and how to make different amounts of money. Finally, all our hard work on our times tables paid off as we took our times table test. 78% of children got 20/25 or higher and 37% got full marks. Well done Year 4!

 

Topic

In topic, Year 4 have been learning about the Ancient Kingdom of Benin, located in modern day Nigeria. This involved a trip to the Horniman Museum where we looked at a variety of primary sources and artefacts. A historian taught us about artwork from the Kingdom of Benin and how some of it ended up in the UK, with many of them being looted. We learnt that the Horniman Museum have sent back most of their items and now have some on loan from Nigeria as they believed this was the right thing to do. In art, we created plaques about ourselves using animals and simples to represent us, just like the Oba did in ancient Benin. Finally, in literacy we wrote newspaper reports about how the British Museum have refused to return artefacts to Nigeria, despite their requests.