Smartie pants in fractions activity!

To build on their understand from Year 3 as the start of our Fractions unit, I gave each class a selection of Smarties and asked them to sort them into colours before converting them into fractions of the total. I then gave them further challenges involving colour and amounts after discussing denominators and numerators.

Children head outside to find their area!

With their partner, Year 4 measured three rectangular shapes on the playground with a metre ruler. Then, they returned to class and used their rounding skills to round their measurements up to the nearest metre before using the length x width formula to calculate the area of each.

Children bring new literacy topic to life

As part of our literacy topic based around the book The Child’s Garden, Y4 spent time discussing how it would feel to be a refugee in another country.

They then took part in a feelings alley activity, where a child played the refugee while the rest of the class questioned her on the positives and negatives of what it was like to be in that situation discussing limited freedom, a search for food and hopes for the future.

The season of Advent begins…

Year 4 started the season of Advent with a day of prayer and activities on November 29. Beginning and ending the day with liturgies with Mrs Bell and our school chaplain, Issie, the children also made a class Advent wreath and individual ones to take home too based around the world and what we can do to help protect it by being a steward. It included all of the candles and the children now need to think about the Hope, Love, Joy and Peace they each represent.
They also took part in a meditation session around the importance of Advent and contributed to a Reverse Class Advent Calendar by creating tasks and prayers they can carry out to show ‘giving’ during the season.

Cookie crumbles nicely for Year 4!

The children spent the morning learning about the history of Ancient Greek food and diet before baking Greek honey-spice cookies and – most importantly – eating them!

After a challenge to separate pictures of Greek and non-Greek foods into the correct piles, the children learned about the ancient traditions of salted fish, bread dipped in wine and honey and figs for dessert.

They then looked more closely at the history of the cookies before they mixed the ingredients carefully together to make them with spice provided by the cinnamon and ground cloves.

After kneading all of the ingredients, the children then moulded the mixture to make their cookie shape before cooking them and enjoying a tasty treat.

Year 4 focus on Anti-Bullying Week

The children have spent this week thinking about how we can help prevent bullying in our school. The theme this year is ‘One Kind Word’ and after discussing how that might look in our school, we also examined the different forms of bullying before acting out various scenarios and discussing the consequences of each as a class. They then designed their own superhero with a power to help others.

Water, water everywhere in Y4!

Year 4 enjoyed a visit from Severn Trent and GEDA Construction on November 8 as they learned more about the value of water, where it comes from and how we can help to conserve it better.
As part of their States of Matter science topic, the children learned all about the water cycle, how we have filtered water over the centuries and discussed as a class the best ways to protect our supply of water after hearing some mind-boggling statistics!

Spotting those scary features….

 

As part of a descriptive writing unit of work, the children discussed the features required to really engage the reader and keep them on the edge of the seats. In their examples, they then worked in pairs to identify the setting, short, sharp sentences, onomatopoeia, similes, strong adjectives and show-me-don’t-tell-me sentences in a scary short story.