It has been a super week in Year 4! This week has been very heavy on our topic of the Romans. We have weaved Romans into all aspects of the curriclum, and the class are all really loving finding out so much information about the ancient civilisation. 

In English, the children have been writing diary entries from the point of view of Marcus, a Roman soldier. They have been learning all about life as a Roman soldier, and about Marcus' dilemma in particular. They have created balanced arguments within their diary entries discussing whether or not to stay in the army or to desert and return to Marcus' homeland. The children have been really enthusiastic about this character, and I'm sure would explain to you a little more about his dilemma.

In our whole class Guided Reading and History, we have learned about Hadrian's Wall. The children learned how it was more than just a wall, but also a series of milecastles, forts and turrets built to keep the Picts in Scotland out of Roman Britannia.

In Maths we have concluded our focus on Roman numerals, and began focussing on Geometry. The children have worked hard to identify angles as acute, obtuse and right angles.

In our PE this week, the children have started circuit training. They have enjoyed a range of activities to develop fitness and strength. 

Have a great weekend everybody!

Mr Bennett

Year 4 have made a brilliant start to 2020! The children have started learning about the Romans as their new topic, and have been very enthusiastic to learn as much as they can!

In English, the class have been learning about Marcus, a Roman soldier with a dilemma; to sail with the army to conquer Britannia or to desert the army and return to his family. We will be considering all the arguments for both sides in our English lessons!

In Maths, Year 4 have learned a lot about statistics, and have been focussing heavily on line graphs. The children have learned how this graph is often the best to show changes in data over time, and they have created their own as well as interpeted existing graphs.

In History, we have explored the spread of the Roman Empire from the early days of Rome and Italy, to the height of the empire, spreading across Europe and into North Africa and Asia.

In our Science, we have began learning about Electricity. The children have really enjoyed exploring circuits using different components and have worked hard to create a complete circuit to light a bulb.

Over the next couple of weeks, the class will continue to have myself as the class teacher until Mrs Stevens' return. I know the class are missing her, and we wish her all the very best! Mr Bennett

This term really has whizzed by and I am very proud of the children and how hard they have worked.

The performance the children put on for our Christmas play was phenomenal and I am sure that you loved watching it as much as they loved performing it!

This week, we have very much enjoyed doing cross stitching the Christmas cards and our Maths mystery problem solving activities, which has really encouraged team work and perseverance- so many children would not go out for break times or lunch times until they had completed the tasks. Party Day was extremely good fun and there was a lot of laughter throughout the day!

I hope that everybody has a wonderful Christmas holiday break, spending lots of time with family and friends. See you all in 2020!

HAPPY CHRISTMAS YEAR 4!

We thoroughly enjoyed our trip to the University of Birmingham yesterday. The children met some real life scientists and took part in some practical investigations, which they absolutely loved! It was also brilliant to have a tour around a real life science lab and to see some of the scientists at work.

In Maths, we have been working on division. So many children have been really enthusiastic to work towards their times table badges which has been brilliant and they have also been able to give the related division facts. In English, the children have worked on creating plans for a diary entry with the focus skills of applying subordinate conjunctions and effective vocabulary to describe emotions.

We started our Christmas play and have made so much progress with it this week. The rehearsals have certainly been very entertaining and we are looking forward to putting it all together.

Have a lovely weekend everybody!

What an eventful week with all of the flooding!

We have had a really good, productive week in Year 4.
In English, the children really picked up the skill of using subordinate conjunctions within sentences. We started by using them in the middle of a sentence and then challenged ourselves to vary the position of the subordination. We watched a really funny video news report about a creature called a ‘Wabub’ and we have started to say the phrase ‘I saw a wabub’ to help us remember the main subordinate conjunctions- if, since, as, when, although, while, after, before, until and because. We also tried to develop our vocabulary, using the thesauruses and descriptosaurus to find effective adjectives and phrases for emotions. We will be using both of these skills in the diary entries we are building up to writing.

In Maths, we have been having a real focus on our times tables and I am so pleased that lots of children are gaining new badges. We use the ‘Supermovers’ videos lots and apply our time stables in problem solving activities too.

We enjoyed Science this week in which we started our new ‘States of Matter’ topic. The children had lots of matter and had to identify whether they were solids, liquids or gases. Some were very challenging such as sugar and rice, that pour like a liquid, or a sponge that doesn’t keep its shape when you squeeze it like a solid typically would. The children really had to think carefully about their justifications when deciding what state the matter was in. We then found out about non- Newtonian fluids and created oobleck!

We love the new John Lewis advert with Edgar the dragon! How perfect for our topic- I am sure we will be using it lots as a stimulus for our writing in a few weeks.

Have a lovely weekend everybody. See you next week.

We have had a brilliant first week back at school. The children made us so proud on our Open Day (and evening!) as they talked so confidently and engagingly to prospective parents.

In Maths, we have been working on multiplication of the 6, 7 and 9 times table. Please continue to practice as much as possible at home. We have been chanting, dancing to supermovers and playing games such as Splat! The children have recorded their tables by drawing them in equal groups, in arrays, on a number line and with repeated addition. They have also worked on some challenging reasoning and problem solving questions!

In English, we looked at a new text type- diary entries. The children looked at lots of examples, finding similarities between those that they read. We read our new text map and there was lots of discussion and analysing of it, so that the children were able to learn from its structure and grammar.

In Science, we planned an extremely fun investigation using the ‘Tasc’ wheel. This was a child led enquiry and they decided that they would like to test whether a humans sense of smell was better than a dogs. Maisie came in to help us with this and absolutely loved the opportunity to prove how brilliant her sense of smell was by finding the treats we put under cups for her!

The children have very much enjoyed Computing, in which we have been working on developing and coding a quiz multiplication game on Scratch.

Have a good weekend!

What a wonderful first half term! I am really proud of all of the children and the progress that they have made over the last couple of months. 

Have a well deserved rest and a good holiday, Year 4! 

It was lovely to see everybody at Parent’s Evening this week and to discuss your children’s progress. I am very proud of all of the children and how they are working in Year 4!

In Maths, we have continued work on addition and subtraction and have applied our column method in the context of problems. We used the bar model to represent the problems before the attempted them.

In English, the children planned for their non- chronological report on Toothless. We acted as ‘dragon spotters’ and collected information about him from the film. We were very surprised about the differences between the book and film! The children have started to write their information texts, applying the skills of organisational features and fronted adverbials of manner.

We loved the opportunity of participating in the Invasion Skills Festival at Birchensale on Thursday. The children took part in three different activities- football, netball and hockey and enjoyed practising skills. It was lovely that we had lots of past Tardebigge pupils leading the activities as Sport Leaders. The children had lots of fun at this event and obviously got very muddy! Thank you for washing the kits.

In Science, as part of our ‘Living things and their Habitats’ topic, we have been looking at how environments can change and how this poses dangers to living things. We watched a few different adverts, such as the Blue Planet II plastic pollution clip, Rang- tan clip, WWF and Greenpeace adverts. We found out about Greta Thunberg and the courageous advocacy that she demonstrates in trying to help encourage others to save our planet.

On Thursday afternoon, we had a very interesting assembly, led by somebody who set up a charity (The Starfish Foundation) helping children in need in Uganda. The children listened so respectfully and have decided they would like to help raise money to support the charity.

Have a good weekend everybody! See you next week.

The highlight of our week so far was definitely our visit from the England netball player- Jade Clarke. Information about her can be found on;
https://www.englandnetball.co.uk/where-it-all-began-jade-clarke/
The children loved the opportunity to see and hold her medals as well as enjoying the different activities that were set up for them to do. They asked lots of relevant questions and were very inspired by the visit.
This week, the children have been applying the skills we have previously worked on (organisational features, expanded noun phrases and fronted adverbials of manner). We applied this in the context of an information text about Maisie! We loved having her ‘huge, bear-like paws’ and ‘mischievous, puppy- dog eyes with a sparkle to them’ in our classroom, whilst we interviewed Mrs Green for information about the tricks and naughty things she does at home! Sorting out which pictures to use in our text was also really good fun.
In Maths, we have been working on subtraction of four digit numbers, including renaming of the ones, tens and hundreds. We did lots of practise with the place value counters to start with and the children did some brilliant journaling of pictorial representations.
Our Science work this week has been all about classifying animals using a classification key or ‘dichotomous key’ (Hilariously, we all say this with an American accent, as we needed to listen to a Youtube clip to find out how it was pronounced!) The children then created their own.
Chocolate fingers caused a real stir in our RE lessons this week! We are learning about temptation and the children had ten minutes with the biscuits on their desks. Listening to the conversations was extremely interesting, as nobody ate them as they ‘knew it was the wrong thing to do’ until one child (who I had briefed to!) picked up his and ate it. After that and seeing that he didn’t get into any trouble, lots of children also gave in. At the end, the 7 children who didn’t give in to temptation were rewarded with a second chocolate finger! We asked Mrs Noor all about when she faces temptation as a Muslim and she told us lots about fasting and how difficult to not give in to temptation, especially when she is around lots of people eating yummy things!
I hope everybody enjoyed cinema night this evening! See you next week everybody.

We have been enjoying our learning in Year 4!

In English, we looked at our new text type of non-chronological reports and identified the features. We also worked on our new skills which are organisational features and fronted adverbials of manner. The children split up my ‘boring’ text (based on the Gronckle from ‘How to train your dragon’) and added a heading, sub- heading, captions and pictures to the text. They also wrote fronted adverbial sentences based on vertebrates, which linked to our Science learning.

In Maths, we have continued working on addition. We have used the place value counters and our journals to show representations of adding four digit numbers with renaming. The children were then very confident in adding using the column method.

Our art work this week involved using water colours, taking inspiration from Jackie Morris’s illustrations in ‘Tell me a dragon.’ In History, we continued our learning about the Stone Age and used key vocabulary, such as chronological/ chronology, BCE and CE, era, Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. The children asked questions about what they would like to find out more about.

In Science, we have been learning about vertebrates. The children enjoyed an experiment making a little plasticine animals with a backbones (pipe cleaners) and without. We then tried to see how many Jenga blocks their ‘animal’ could hold before collapsing and concluded that backbones help vertebrates to stay upright and keep their shape.

Have a lovely weekend everybody!