Welcome To Oak's Class Webpage
On our page we will be sharing our learning experiences and providing key information to parents.
Our Class Teacher is Miss Dyball
Our Learning Support Assistants are Mrs Wightman, Mrs Telford and Mrs Johnson.
Oak's Expectations
In Oak we are expected to complete the following challenges each week:
Reading
Read independently or with an adult 5 times during the week (Friday - Friday).
Children can take Accelerated Reader quizzes on their library books and books from home by following the link below.
Maths
Children are expected to use Times Table Rockstars 10 minutes every day, this will really support your children to become confident with their timestables ready for teir maths learning and the end of year 4 timestables check.
I will set new Mathletics tasks each week, relating to our learning in class.
Please see links below for both TTRS and Mathletics.
Spellings
Each Friday I will set 10 new spellings for the following week. Children are to practise these at home as they will be tested on these the following Friday.
Autumn 2025
The children have worked so hard all term and produced some amazing work across all subjects. Please read below for an indepth description of some of the work covered in both Maths, English and our exciting Autumn Term topic of 'Chocolate'.
Maths
Our first unit of work was Place Value where we consolidated the childrens understanding from Year 3 where they learnt how to represent numbers upto 1000. This 3 week unit taught the children how to estimate, round and partition numbers upto 10,000.
We also had lots of fun in the place value unit of work reading and decoding Roman numerals.
Our second unit of work after half term was learning the formal methods of column addition and subtraction. We then applied these skills to lots of problem solving and reasoning questions.
The children have also made great strides in their times tables knowledge with coverage of 3's,4's,6's and 7's.
Each Friday we complete a Year 4 arithmetic test, the aim is for all children to attempt all questions and be confident in using formal methods by summer term.
English
The Wild Girl
The children spent the first half term looking at 'The Wild Girl' by Christopher Wormell. This excellent picture book is about a young girl living alone in the woods with her small brown dog. All is well until one cold winter's day a bear decides to visit their warm, safe cave.
Using this text as our theme we built towards the children creating their own wild story. They developed their own characters, animals and plots to produce their own excellent stories.
Talk for Reading
In Year 4 we looked at Voices In The Park by Anthony Browne as our text. This thought provoking book is about a visit to a park told through the voices of two very different adults and children. With themes of class, society, friendship and prejudice it proved to be a very challenging text which helped develop the childrens understanding of how to deeply read a text and use evidence to prove your thoughts.
Chocolate
What an incredible time we have had with our Autumn Term Topic of chocolate. From understanding the origins of chocolate with the Ancient Mayans to exploring Central America in Geography and making some truly disgusting science experiments in Science.
In Science we began the first half term exploring Solids, Liquids and Gases using chocolate as our theme throughout by exploring reversible and irreversible changes and then exploring the water cycle. After half term we have looked at Animals including humans to look at teeth, digestion and the part played by all animals in food chains. We of course had to eat lots of chocolate throughout purely for scientific reasons.
In History we explored the ancient Mayans that existed from 250 AD all the way upto 1697. Incredibly they survived due to their isolated location in Central America being hid from the rest of the world by Jungles. Thankfully the Mayans helped develop chocolate which we can be eternally grateful for.
In Geography we looked at the birth place of the Mayan which is now South Eastern Mexico. We compared the land use with Colchester and how the land was essential for the survival of the Mayans. We also compared the Mayans with the Anglo Saxons and found some startling similarities and obvious differences.
Art was based around chocolate and the children learnt various shading and sketching methods to draft pictures of chocolate. They also developed their own idea for a chocolate bar and created a brand and wrapper for the bar.
The children all found the unit of work both fascinating and delicious.
Other foundation subjects covered:
Music:
In Music we began by looking at body and tuned percussion. We were inspired by the different layers of the rainforest and how the animals might be represented. After this we explored 'what is Samba?' and and how percussion could be used to build layers of offbeat percussive sounds to create our own Samba beat.
Religious Education:
Enquiry: Where do Christian religious beliefs come from?
Enquiry: What do we mean by truth? Is seeing believing?
French:
In the autumn term the children met the French unit Je Peux…( I am Able) which explored how to use French verbs to explain what they were able to do in sentences. E.g. phrases like I am able to play. We followed this with the unit called Les fruits (Fruits) where we explored some common fruits.
