Author: Mrs Gibbons

We’ve had a great week in year 4. Our Lent learning culminated in this week’s reflection and celebration today and the children’s understanding of the Lent season has deepened. Their contributions to the Liturgical Art competition were varied and stunning.

We very much enjoyed reading “Matchbox Diary” and will start “Weslandia” when we return. “The Lighthouse Letters” is already intriguing and we’re looking forward to continuing that after the holiday.

The “Rock Steady” children gave fantastic performances on Tuesday and the choir gave a rousing, beautiful performance today. A few more members of year 4 joined the choir recently and it would be wonderful to see more children doing the same. Joining in a song with a large group of people is a brilliant feeling.

Thank you for your support of your children this term, whether it be by buying cakes or helping with home learning or all the other positive, supportive things you do for your children and families. I wish you all a relaxing, enjoyable holiday whether at home or abroad and look forward to seeing you all again in late April.

A wave of excitement rolled over year 4 this morning when we saw our classmates’ names topping the leader board in TTRS! And more names are appearing further down the leader board. Great job, year 4 – let’s give years 5 and 6 a run for their money. Keep playing Garage to improve your recall. Then, when your accuracy is there, play Studio and your status will improve.

This was after a lovely mass at St Barts, with years 3 and 4. Behaviour was impeccable and the children were a credit to all their adults.

Thank you to the original works of art which are coming in for the home learning/art competition. Each one is unique and, as a class, we are enjoying celebrating each creation.

The children also used their creativity to illustrate one station of the cross in watercolours, as part of our understanding of Good Friday.

As it’s the end of term, we’re finishing off the learning in topics. We have finished the chapter about fractions and next week will be learning about time, in particular the number of minutes in an hour, weeks in a year, etc. We will have lots of absorbing problems to get stuck into. We’ve all found learning about physical features of the earth such as volcanoes and rivers very interesting. We will start “Letters from the Lighthouse” next week, as our reading book.

Have a lovely weekend and let’s hope the rain stays away.

We all hope you enjoyed year 4’s tribute to their wonderful grannies, aunties, mums, great-grandmas and other significant women in their lives. The words were created collectively and the children loved filling the room with happy voices in recognition of all that is done for them.

We are moving on with our learning in Lent. We have been thinking about the role of self-sacrifice in our lives, particularly during Lent but also in general. I haven’t sent a specific piece of Lent homework in the spring home learning grid, but please remember the Easter art competition. I’ve included some suggested scripture on Google Classroom.

The children’s understanding of fractions is developing very well, in little stages. I’ve been reminding them about the importance of pictures – diagrams – to show and develop understanding in Maths. Drawing the fractions as pizza/pie or as a bar model are very effective ways to problem-solve and also prove your answer.

We marked Science Week with an investigation involving carbon dioxide, leading on from the learning on states of matter. We found out that the hotter the water the more carbon dioxide is produced in a mixture of yeast and sugar. It was very exciting, as you can see. In one batch, the balloon split and so the gaseous liquid spread everywhere. Can your child explain this, thinking about how molecules in different states behave?

I hope you all have a lovely weekend. With the longer days (if not the temperatures) it’s starting to feel a bit springlike.

Year 4 finished learning about “The Lion and The Unicorn” by writing their own versions of the story and used creative noun phrases to describe the scary night scene when their main character tried to run away. “Jack felt crushed, he made a decision. Stealthily, he packed his bags and snuck out the back door. Through the garden he weaved through the branches from the dead tree. After that, he scampered through the arch …”

Understanding about fractions is going well and the children are using complex terminology such as “improper fraction”.

The children supported Mrs Porter in her sponsored walk, not letting a bit of rain put them off.

Have a great weekend everyone.

There was a wide range of characters in year 4 today – and they were all very keen to take a journey to the centre of the earth and write all about it in books they made themselves. The books are a work in progress as everyone put lots of time and care into their writing and illustrating a cross-section of the earth. As is always the case with geographical and scientific learning, the children are super-keen to acquire knowledge and use word like “magma”, “core” and think about what it must be like at the centre of the earth, where it is as hot as the sun. We were linking knowledge from previous years – basalt, granite, for instance – to understand this year’s learning better.

This half-term has got off to a flying start.

The children are concluding learning about states of matter and had good ideas as to why the ice with the salt on it melted faster than without salt.

With Mrs Gallaher, the children composed music for the “flying car” scene in “Harry Potter”.

The children thought carefully about what they could do in Lent to be closer to God , whether their promise was to do with giving, praying or giving something up. Their behaviour in the Ash Wednesday service was impeccable and they enjoyed learning about the symbolism involved. We are doing activities from The Mission Together Lenten Calendar – https://missiontogether.org.uk/calendar/lent/ which has some lovely things to do. I sent one home earlier this week. It wasn’t compulsory home learning – I just thought it was a really nice, engaging activity you might enjoy. We’ve reflected on the significance of 40 during Lent and why Jesus went into the desert.

The children are really enjoying our new book – “The Lion and The Unicorn”, which is providing inspiration for writing. In Reading sessions we are reading “The Firework-Maker’s Daughter”, which I’m mentioning at consultations. These books are online in various ways. It’s always useful to read the books at home to share what your children are learning, discuss vocabulary and themes in the book. Like the other books we read, they are beautiful and full of lovely language and ideas. They could give you an idea of what to wear for World Book Day next Friday!

It’s been lovely to speak to all the parents about your wonderful children, their achievements and progress.

I hope you all have great weekends.

Year 4 are delighted with the books and wet play activities the cake sale money has bought. They now have their own chess set, card game and play doh for when the weather isn’t good enough to go outside. Reading sessions are much better with brand-new copies of “The Firework Maker’s Daughter” to share, too. We’ve been looking at the similarities between this book and the one we are using for writing inspiration – “Cinnamon”.

We’ve been having a great time thinking about mental health, including safer internet use. The themes of these are “let’s connect” and Want to talk about it?”, so we’ve all been thinking about the benefits of communication in all its forms.

We stretched and breathed like superheroes during a “yoga bugs” session, which is an online site you might want to use yourself as a calming down activity during half-term holiday!

We made paper hats together and then made tweaked them to make them our own.

Have a happy, safe half-term break!

This week we eventually found out that gas does have a mass. It took a long time for the carbon dioxide to seep out of the bottle of Coke and it was with much excitement that we found that the bottle with carbon dioxide weighed 521g and the one without (identical all other measurements) weighed 514g, so the carbon dioxide weighed 7g.

We often do an “imoves” routine in-between learning, to stay lively. Here is the class doing one of this week’s routines.

We celebrated the NSPCC “Number Day” today with some active Maths activities, mainly based around times-tables. Outside the children: practised reciting multiples of given times tables to skipping or passing the football; created 4-digit numbers in hoops with beanbags for a partner to correctly identify; see who was quickest at answering the “line of equations”; and wrote missing number calculations using things from nature. So if the calculation was a pine-cone x 5 = 60, what would the pine-cone be? Indoors, we played times-table Bingo and the Multiples and Factors game which is also for home learning.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and l look forward to seeing you for Wellbeing Week before the half-term holiday.

After the excitement of Monday, normal service resumed for the rest of the week. The children have completed their stories entitled “Spring’s Daughter”, a sequel to the beautiful book “Winter’s Child” on which they worked very hard and had wonderful ideas, inspired by the clear prose and imagery of the picture book.

The cake sale raised a fantastic £182! Thank you so much for your hard work and generosity in supporting this. We have fifteen brand-new copies of “The Firework Maker’s Daughter”, ready for use. The children have lots of ideas for wet play games which we’ll vote on. And then there will be the opportunity to buy some more books for reading sessions. These represent a brilliant improvement in classroom resources to make the learning more engaging and the time at school more fun. Well done, everyone.

Neve and Livia led a lovely child-led class worship today, reflecting on the fruits of the spirit.

I hope you all have a lovely three days together with your families.

Year 4 showed their passion and understanding of what makes a good community today in their class assembly. It was a reflection on what we have been learning the past weeks, including our trips to Young Voices and the cathedral. The children took on board all the advice and encouragement from our practises – to say what they needed to say with meaning, with the precise choice of words down to them. I was particularly proud of the confidence they showed, owning the floor and looking out for each other with the “props” and microphone. It was a fantastic start to the week and created a warm glow of pride in year 4 to counterbalance the below freezing temperatures in the morning.

We also enjoyed marking the Lunar New Year, with children sharing their excitement at receiving their red envelopes and explaining traditions to us