Welcome back to the Spring Term!

SCIENCE WEEK!

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY ART

The children created art using natural materials.

SCIENCE WEEK CONTINUED

Science update - we left our ecosystems untouched over the half term break to see if they would continue to survive without an environmental changes, nothing was changed and no water was added.  We concluded that if an environment remains untouched it can sustain itself.  The children are interested in taking this experiment further so we are going to begin to 'alter' the environment next week to see what happens - I'll keep updating this page so we can see how the image changes over time!

For world book day we enjoyed designing and creating our wooden spoon book characters - these will be used around school in our story telling.  Our highlight was a whole school trip to Bradford Alhambra to see MC Grammar and Sir Lenny Henry.  We rapped, danced and enjoyed some stories whilst getting some top tips on how to become a successful author.

In Science we've been learning about sound - we linked this to our computer topic: Data logging and created a scientific enquiry asking: Is our classroom the loudest? We used data loggers to measure the decibels of different areas around school.  We then added this information to a chart and worked out our averages before concluding that our class was the quietest in school! We cannot tell you, of course, which was the loudest! 

During mental health week we've worked together to 'connect' through lots of different activities.  The children enjoyed working through an A to Z of how to connect and getting a little chocolate heart at the end.  We've made collaborative art, made bookmarks,  and shared stories with our new Year 2 reading buddies, joined in new games, took part in some mood boosters online and finished off our week by watching the film 'Inside out' whilst enjoying some snacks in our personally made movie snack boxes!

For safer internet day we learnt how to stay safe online and joined in with lots of different activites - our favourite was consolidating our learning using interland to help 'legend' the robot to make the right choices to help stay safe online.

In Science last week we created a new scientific enquiry to see how humans affect our ecosystems.  We made our own ecosystem in a bottle and observed it over the last two weeks to see how an ecosystem would grow without any changes from humans.  We saw the cress seeds grow and flourish and the system maintaining itself, these have come home over half term to see if they can remain a sustainable environment without any support - we look forward to the eco warriors feeding back on what happened!

Linked to our Romans topic, the children have been learning about Roman monuments in Art. This week, we started to apply our existing knowledge about 3D shapes, to create the 'Pantheon' in Rome. The children worked well together in groups to make the dome part of the Pantheon and will continue to improve their creations and models over the next two weeks.

We've really enjoying linking our learning from The Great Kapok tree to our Kennings poems this week.  We read about some of the different animals that live there and created our own poems.  Can you guess what animals we are describing?

We enjoyed having a visit from life caravan to our classroom this week and getting to learn all about how 'it's great to be me'.  The children learnt about how to stay healthy and loved the interactive x-ray t-shirt where we could see inside ourselves!

In RE last week we listened to the song Wonderful World and then used our own ideas to create a collaborative class poem.

Thank you all for such a lovely warm welcome this term - I hope you and your families all have a wonderful Christmas break and we look forward to seeing you again in the New Year. Enjoy the photos below of all our Christmas activities!

We've loved wearing our Christmas socks today - some lovely fluffy ones have come in very handy in the extra cold weather! Well done to everyone taking part to raise money for the hospital.

As we come to the end of the term we have enjoyed finishing off all our topics but most of all the children have been such enthusiastic learners with our Ancient Egyptian topic.  We ended our unit with a scientific enquiry and the great unveiling of the mummified oranges! Our results we're amazing - we can't wait to compare these to the Year 3 mummified tomatoes to see whose worked best.  Thank you to all the parents for supporting your children in a variety of different topic challenges - pyramids, gods, costumes, artefacts and so much more.   

We really enjoyed inviting our parents in to our Egyptian open afternoon last week.  The children spent time sharing some of their learning and creating some Egyptian crafts with the support of their parents.  Thank you to all of the parents for attending and we look forward to having you all in class again at more events in the future!

Happy Children in Need day! We enjoyed celebrating and raising money for Children in Need.  In year 4 we consolidated our learning so far on our times tables by getting creative with spots and making our own times table arrays for a classroom display.  We also enjoyed writing our own acrostic poems and looking more closely at a range of different charity symbols to link to our prior knowledge about symbols in RE.

On positive noticing day we talked about how we can keep encouraging each other by noticing and appreciating the little things we each bring to our home, our friends, our family and our school and celebrating these.  We made each other tags to remind each of us how special we are and then made cards to send to the teachers and people in our family to remind them how special they are.  We linked our learning about internet safety to talk about how we can also remember to be kind and positive online.  

We have been busy preparing some Ancient Egyptian games in preparation for our Ancient Egyptian open afternoon for the parents/carers next Thursday.  We have made Mehen and Sennet and look forward to playing them with the people who can attend.

In Geography we have been learning about Mediterranean Europe - this week we looked at what food grows there and enjoyed sampling some of them.  Olives are not everyone's favourite!

In RE we have been learning all about symbols.  This week we linked our learning to the symbol of the poppy for Remembrance Day.  We looked at what each of the different coloured poppies mean and then made our own stained-glass window symbols.  These are displayed on the main windows as you come into the school grounds for all the see.

As we continue to learn more exciting discoveries about the Egyptians, we have made some final touches this week to our Egyptian 3D landscapes. We have incorporated the amazing pyramids that we created into our landscapes. We have used our DT and art skills to add more detail, making our landscapes look more realistic. Take a look!

We had a great day on Halloween with a 'pumpkin' themed day - we read Spookley the square pumpkin in our PSHE and English.  Solved a Halloween maths mystery and had some fun creating edible pumpkin biscuits and line art work.

As we finish for the first half of the Autumn term, we would just like to share with you the amazing songs that the Year 3 and Year 4 class have been learning how to perform in singing. A Harvest song and a spooky one, we hope you enjoy listening to them!

We've had a busy but fun couple of weeks in Year 4.

Probably the most talked about this week will be the 'poo' we made in Science!  This was a great way to learn all about the parts that make up our digestive system.  We made our experiment using some household items to represent the different parts of the digestive system.  First, we added a couple of crackers, banana, water (saliva) to a stomach (plastic zip lock bag!) with a little fresh orange (stomach acid).  Then we mimicked the stomach walls using muscles to break down the food into a pulp.  We then followed the system down into the small intestine (tights) where we had to take out the nutrients (fluid) into the body (flan case).  Finally, we had the last part of the journey through the large intestine (paper cup with a hole in the base!) pushing out the waste 'poo'! If you would like to do this experiment at home, then the YouTube link is below.

In PSHE this week we focused on Mental Health Awareness and thought about what is good for our personal mental health.  We created our own Mental health hearts about what we like to do to ensure we are keeping ourselves happy and giving ourselves time to reflect, recharge and relax.  The children created some lovely pieces, some of these are shown below.

In Art we linked our learning all about Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and used papyrus paper to draw them onto and replicate an Egyptian hieroglyphic cartouche.  Some are pictured below:

New this term in Year 4 is 'Friendship club'.  We had a great first friendship club today and the children will each get a chance to come over the course of the remainder of this term and next term.  We enjoyed making some fimo creations this week, expression our individualism whilst learning how to share, ask for what we needed politely and offer positive comments to each other.

This week the children have brought in a fantastic array of different pyramids linked to the art homework, thank you to all the children (and parents/grandparents/carers) who have shown such enthusiasm with their learning at home and some of the creations are shown below.  These have now been added to the 3D models we are creating in class.

Science update!

The children had an amazing time discovering what happened to our eggs.  We discovered that the egg in milk and water remained unaffected.  However, the eggs in the Dr Pepper and fresh tropical juice showed some sign of decay to the egg shells.  We discussed how the shell is similar to our enamel on our teeth and saw the importance of making sure we limit the amount of sugary drinks in our diet and brush our teeth regularly.

In science we have been learning about how to stay healthy and began a scientific enquiry to answer the following question: How do certain drinks impact our teeth?

Watch this space to discover what we found out later on!

We have been enhancing our learning about Ancient Egyptians over the last couple of weeks by creating a piece of instructional writing based on our mummification of an orange experiment. We discovered how mummification of humans was done in Ancient Egypt and then applied this knowledge to having a go ourselves - with an orange! 

The children were shown the story below and asked to think about how they may not be able to do something yet - but Mrs Samtaney-Roberts and Mrs Farmery will help them to find ways to achieve their full potential as we go through year 4 together.

We have had a great week so far celebrating our love of books - we have become authors and illustrators creating a book cover and writing our own blurb.

We have had time to reflect on the loss of our Queen and what she meant to us, we would like to share some of the thoughts we wrote down.