Category: Our Classes

As geographers, this is what year 4 have been doing this week. Geography is about the interaction of humans with their physical environment, local and global. Year 4 has considered the global perspective through exploring “Plastic vs Planet” and the local one by doing field-survey on litter – plastic and non-plastic – round the school. The children found out that the amount of plastic litter really affects the environmental quality of an area. We discussed how the quantity of plastic we use on a daily basis can be reduced. There was some shock at the quantity and type of litter left in the area, particularly as some of it came from a very popular local fast food outlet! This led to an interesting discussion about how necessary fast food is. Due to the children’s loathing of cigarette butt litter, the conversations took in the piece of news that this generation of children will not be able to purchase cigarettes legally. Such is the range of discussion in human geography when cross-curricular discussion is encouraged and we step outside the school gates. The children’s behaviour was excellent on our journey round the school and they loved seeing the school from different perspectives, piecing together their various memories of different walks over time.

The children chose images of the local area to represent what they saw. The photos are realistic rather than clasically pretty!

Back at school, the children worked well together to present the data using Google Charts. They wrote reports on what they had done, what they found out, their conclusions and recommendations.

As part of our learning in Art and Design, we have been exploring butterflies in art. We explored the artwork of milliner, Philip Treacy who created a tremendous headpiece filled with butterflies made out of painted turkey feathers.

We were inspired by Philip Treacy’s artwork and had a go for ourselves. Just look at our wonderful class creation!

This week, we have celebrated Earth Day and explored the theme of ‘Planet vs Plastics’.

As part of our geography week, we have used our field-work skills to conduct a survey of packaging in our packed lunches. Our analysis of this data has shaped our thinking on what we can practically do at St Adrian’s to reduce our plastic waste.

In English, we have learnt more about the issues facing our planet, reading Georgia Amson-Bradshaw’s book ‘Plastic Planet’. We are putting this expertise to good use as we combine it with what we have learnt through our field-work to prepare speeches for the school council’s ‘Talk It Out’ competition.

We have also shared our knowledge by creating a class website in Computing to share some of the issues that we face living in an increasingly ‘plastic planet’.

In other learning, we have enjoyed exploring light in science, using our understanding of reflection to make periscopes.

Each term, the children are given a selection of activities to do at home that greatly enhance their learning across the curriculum. The children enjoy sharing this learning with their friends and it is often added to our displays for everyone to see. The Year 2 summer home learning grid has now been published on the Google Classroom and we are looking forward to seeing just how creative the children get this term, too.

On Wednesday, we went to the Cathedral. We developed our map reading skills by using grid references to help us locate key objects in the Cathedral. Our favourite part of the day was making the clay tiles. We were inspired by the beauty of the Cathedral.

Hope you had a great Easter. It has been a busy first week back.

In English we have been looking at non-fiction books.

In Maths we are learning to count in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s.