Mrs Gibbons

Welcoming May, the month of Mary

Year 4 has done this beautifully this week, with a wonderful, calm and instructive mass led by Fr Michael on Wednesday. Fr Michael was impressed by the children’s respectful behaviour and well they led the service. He took opportunities to help the children understand aspects of the service and the importance of Mary in her role as an intercessory, explaining why we crown her with flowers.

The children’s illustrations for “Mary ascended into heaven” were beautiful and were well-presented at today’s moving “Crowning of Mary” assembly.

We have been reading scripture from John and learning about the time after Jesus’s resurrection. We were very lucky today, that Saint Peter came to visit us and agreed to be “hot seated” to share his feelings about the events by the lake, when Jesus appeared to the disciples. The children immersed themselves in the topic very well and showed empathy in considering Peter’s feelings at the time. Yesterday, they acted out the scene when Peter discovered that the tomb was empty.

The children built shelters to explore ideas of what would make a good shelter, which formed the basis for their initial sentences based our new book “Weslandia”. A few of them are below. The children are also enjoying our class reader called “The Pebble in My Pocket”. The pebbles you see daily could be 450 million years old! They are also enjoying our guided reading text “The Firework Maker’s Daughter”.

Leaping into spring!

The “lost hour” hasn’t held year 4 back this week at all and they have participated well in the end-of-term events. They showed respect during the Stations of the Cross assembly and have done the same, as well as reflecting well, during the class Lenten daily prayer accompanying each Station of the Cross. They sang beautifully at the assemblies this week and have enjoyed the sun at breaktimes, as we all have.

Many thanks for everyone’s support in helping your children create their own prayers in the class prayer book. I have been moved by the ideas and beliefs expressed in these original, heartfelt prayers which have been carefully written out and beautifully presented. The prayer book will continue to be passed down the register. There will be a new one in year 5.

We completed writing from “The Matchbox Diary” with the children making excellent progress in writing clear, meaningful and well-spelt sentences with a good range of vocabulary. I think there definitely several Geography graduates in the cohort, judging from their interest in the physical features of the earth – especially volcanoes! We will come back to finish some learning on Decimals after the holiday.

We finished the term with creating “stained glass” Easter cards which I hope you all like.

The purses/wallets the children sewed will be on display at “open evening” and will go home at the end of the year. All the children worked very hard on their sewing, whether they are used to sewing or it was their first time. They all showed resilience and good humour in enjoying the pleasures and tackling the challenges of sewing! The class was lovely and calm and there was lots of co-operation throughout the sessions.

Although we all enjoyed the sun this week and are looking forward to our Easter break, there was also some sadness today as we had to say good-bye to someone most of the children have known for a huge part of their lives. We are all extremely sad to lose Bella from our class community. However, just as importantly, we send her off on her adventure with love and best wishes for an exciting new chapter in her life!

For those of us staying closer to home, I wish you all a relaxing, happy two week holiday, hopefully with some sun and fresh air.

Happy Mother’s Day!

We hope you enjoyed our song at the Mother’s Day assembly. Everyone worked very hard, as an orchestral team, to sing and play together – no mean achievement! A huge thank you is owed to Mrs Newman, who came into school on Thursday afternoon, as an extra visit to help the class know the song better.

We are completing end-of-term checks such as spelling and completing units of learning like fractions. There is further progress being made in times tables recall please keep that practice going.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and Mother’s Day, in spite of the “lost hour”.

Lent in Year 4

One of the ways the children in year 4 are becoming closer to God through praying is by leading a short reflection and prayer on each station of the cross every day. For example, today we reflected on Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carrying the cross and this led to the reflection that there are things in life we don’t always choose or want to do. However, it’s important to accept that they need doing and remember that we can always turn to God for help in completing them.

The children have also explored stations number 10, 11 and 12 by sharing the relevant scripture, painting a watercolour illustrating one of them and them writing a description/explanation of it. The children put a lot of planning and effort into creating some beautiful paintings. They then wrote, at length, about their emotional responses to the scenes. The more we considered the story, the more the children made links and brought in other pieces of scripture which meant something to them, such as the centurion who said, “Surely this man was the son of God”. I am very proud of their creativity and thoughtfulness.

Participating in communities – year 4

Year 4 has thought carefully about which communities they belong to and how they can improve their talents to make these communities even better. Their ideas are now on display.

The children have made a great start with writing their biographies of the character from “The Matchbox Diary” who they have decided is called Leo Francis.

In both “Odd and The Frost Giants” and the Science learning the children have learnt about water existing in different states. Can they find it in the various different states at home this weekend?

Have a lovely weekend.

World Book Day in year 4

Year 4 looked wonderful in their costumes on Thursday as many different characters from different stories visited the school. I’m sorry that Mrs Finnie isn’t in the photo. You can see her as a fantastic “Cat in the Hat” in the bulletin photo.

Thank you for supporting your children in sending in the objects and pictures in their matchboxes. There were many beautiful and precious items and it was wonderful to hear their stories. The children really enjoyed using them in their writing and it is these sort of stimuli which bring out their creativity and desire to use writing to communicate ideas and feelings. Here they are talking about their objects with each other. They wrote about two objects. We analysed the first piece of writing for successful parts and to identify what could be changed and the second pieces of writing were all improved on the first ones. If anyone would has a use for the matches from 100 matchboxes, please let me know!

I hope you’re all enjoying the wonderful sunshine!

Matchbox Memories in Year 4

Thank you for returning the matchboxes containing objects for memories. Please could you return the rest on Monday, when we will use them for writing. The children’s imagination has really been sparked by “The Matchbox Diary” and they have completed some thoughtful writing inspired by it.

It is was great to discuss your children’s successes and achievements with you on Thursday and I look forward to doing the same with the rest of you on Tuesday.

We’ve come to the end of learning about perimeter and area and the children enjoyed working with shapes. Next week we’ll move onto Fractions. Please complete the MyMaths home learning for this as this will help get everyone off to a good start. Thank you.

Loving to read, reading for pleasure, choosing reading as an occupation, etc is important and a great habit to get into. I’ve discussed this with a number of parents during these consultations and there is evidence that, worryingly, this love of reading for pleasure is fading in children. As one of our guided reading carousel sessions, children read one of the books from the class library, for pleasure. (By contract, choice from the school library is completely free, so a child may choose a picture book, or a fact book in small print, or anything else, as they choose.) Hopefully these sessions will help to encourage this and also introduce the children to authors they will want to read more of. Here is the whole class enjoying reading today.

I hope that you all have a relaxing weekend in sunshine!

Wrapping up spring 1 in year 4

The children have concluded this half-term with some fantastic writing, particularly their diary entries based on “Cinnamon”. This book really sparked their imaginations and the children still managed to find new things in the book which I hadn’t noticed. ~They have all really enjoyed the netball sessions with some fantastic, fast passing. The Roman topic has been great fun I’ve reminded the children there is still more Roman learning to do in St Albans – for example, visiting the theatre, which I just found out today is the only one now in Britain!

Below are the children with the learning resources we have bought with the very generous cake sale money. Fortunately, the children have positioned all the components of the digestive system correctly! It’s very good to revisit learning from previous topics, to check that the knowledge and understanding have been embedded.

The children also have this model of the ear to help with their understanding of hearing.

The child-friendly map of the Roman Empire has helped the children understand its size and the countries it ruled over.

I have also ordered some more Thesauruses so there is one between two for whenever the children choose to refer to them.

Altogether, these selection of learning resources will help the children learn independently and are things they enjoy using.

Week of 3rd February in year 4

There were some quiet sessions in year 4 this week, with the choir members at Young Voices. We had lots of fun outside on a bright Wednesday afternoon, with just about half the class playing netball. The passing was fast and accurate!

The children played a dice game to practise their times tables, as the choir children arrived on Thursday morning.

children are really enjoying our current book “Cinnamon”. During the hot-seating on Thursday, they thought of excellent questions such as “How did you feel when the tiger ate your aunty?” and “Before you felt the emotions with the tiger, had you experienced them before?” and “Why did you go into the jungle?”. The question “Why didn’t you talk?” was answered with, “Because I didn’t have anything to talk about”, which was a thoughtful answer considering the context of the book.

As part of understanding the Eucharist, the children “interviewed” Mrs Gallaher about how going to mass helps her. The children were keen to understand what part of mass she enjoyed most and Mrs Gallaher talked about how she liked to try and apply something from the homily into her daily routine the next week.