We are so proud of all of the children for being tour guides on Monday, we could burst! Listening to how confidently they spoke to the parents and children looking around our school about how much they loved Tardebigge was wonderful. Thank you so much to the children who came back to school in the evening too- you did a brilliant job. The feedback we have had about the children has always been extremely positive, but this year it was even more so, so a huge well done to everybody!

The Rang tan video which we have used as a stimulus for writing over the past few weeks has been featured in many news reports and articles over the last week. After hearing this, the children have become even more passionate about the orangutans being affected by palm oil. We were planning to change our writing focus this week. However, after seeing how worried the children were and listening to their very insightful, emotive comments, we are now planning to create a class advert, to help gain even more awareness. We have focussed on persuasive techniques this week, after watching lots of Greenpeace and WWF adverts and have worked on the skill of using fronted adverbials of frequency when writing facts. The children have been really inspired by this unit of work and an example of one the children’s ‘Morfo’ can be seen below;

In Maths, the children have been working on strategies to help them with mental calculation (such as rounding to the nearest ten or hundred) We have also started work on subtracting without renaming, using the place value disks, using a pictorial method and the standard column method. An example can be seen below;

Miss Cooke has taught some brilliant Geography lessons this week! The children demonstrated their understanding of where the equator, tropics of cancer and Capricorn, the prime meridian and the arctic and Antarctic circle was placed in the world using paper plates, string and pipe cleaners. The children have also been comparing the Amazon rainforest to forests in the UK.
Thank you for all wearing stripes or spots today to support Children in Need! Have a good weekend.

It sounds as though everybody had a wonderful half term. It is lovely to have everybody back and we have all very much enjoyed our first week after the break.

I am sure that you have seen the poppy display on our fence outside. The children were fascinated during discussions about Remembrance Day and really unpicked the symbolism behind the following video clip which was shown to all year groups;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04p4zsl

In Maths, we have been continuing our work on column addition of four digit numbers using base ten resources, place value disks and Th H T O grids to explain our methods. In English, the children have written up their first person narratives and created orangutan ‘Morphos’ using an app to read their work aloud.

Brilliant sportsmanship was displayed at Birchensale on Thursday when we competed against other schools in the Invasion Games Tournament as part of the School Games. The children played five matches of either hockey, football or a net ball based game. At one point, we noticed a rainbow in the sky and the children saw this as a sign of good luck, believing it was our school logo in the sky! We were extremely proud of all of our children and delighted that our footballers came first.

Overall, a brilliant week! Enjoy the weekend.

HAPPY HALF TERM!
Once again, the children have blown us away with their writing this week! They have written from the point of view from an orangutan experiencing deforestation, due to palm oil production. Some sentences taken from their writing are below;

In a state of terror, I watched as the savages destroyed my precious habitat until there was nothing left.

Frantically, I ran for my life and chased after my Mother.
“I miss my beautiful, dense, tropical rainforest home,” I murmured sadly, as a tear fell down my cheek.

The men were abhorrent and used their metallic machinery to destroy our precious home.

As you can see, all of the children were so enthusiastic to use all of the new skills we have been working on in our writing, including fronted adverbials of manner, speech using inverted commas and expanded noun phrases using advanced vocabulary.

In Maths, the conversations that the children have been having have been wonderful! We have been learning to use column addition with renaming and they have been proving the method using the resources- physically removing ten ones counters to replace with one tens counter or ten tens counters with a hundreds counter. We really encourage discussion, so that we get an idea that the children have a deep understanding of what they are doing, as opposed to just learning a process.

We enjoyed a ‘Stressbox’ session this week, in which the children learned strategies for when they feel worried or stressed. We focussed on breathing techniques and absolutely loved the opportunity to practise boxing with the pads and gloves.

There are lots of scientists in Year 4! This week, we dissected a lily to closely observe the male and female parts of the plant- the stamen and carpel. We got the boys in our class (our stamens!) to refer to their heads as their anthers, their bodies as their filaments and their hair as the pollen! The girls (our carpels!) referred to the top of their head as the stamen, their bodies as the style and their feet as the ovary!

Wow! What a brilliant week in Year 4! The children worked extremely hard on their ‘Baby Shark’ inspired Harvest song- ‘The Annoying Harvest Song’ and were very proud of their performance. All classes sang their songs brilliantly and were definitely very entertaining.

Our Botanical Gardens trip was the best day ever! We learned so much from both of the sessions we took part in, leaning lots about the Rainforest and meeting some animals (including a very cure tenrec, called Loki, who we fell in love with!) The backpack challenge was also brilliant- we loved the opportunity to work in teams to find the rainforest plants in the tropical house, using clues from the explorer bags! Enjoy looking through the pictures- please click on the link.

I cannot believe the enthusiasm displayed by everybody in our new English/ topic work. We started the week with the classroom filled with plastic and images. We also watched some of the highlights from Blue Planet 2 and then I shared my example first person narrative text- written from a turtle’s point of view, describing the impact the plastic had on his life. The children analysed this text, discussing the SPaG they could find within it and the effect it had.
We were extremely engaged by the following Greenpeace advert;

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/13/greenpeaces-hand-painted-story-orangutan-pressures-unilever-and-nestl-palm-oil

The children were very moved by this advert and are extremely enthusiastic about their task for next week- to write a first person narrative from the orangutan’s point of view, inspired by the advert and example text. We have spent time on the IPads, searching for more information about orangutans and palm oil. We watched the following; 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/39492207

Maths this week has been enjoyable, using the place value counters to help solve addition calculations. We have also started to move on to using the column method to add four digit numbers without renaming. We will move on to renaming next week.

Overall, a very exciting week! I cannot wait to see how the children’s plans for their orangutan first person narratives develop next week. Have a brilliant weekend and see you all on Monday.

Hello! My name is Miss Cooke and I will be here all the way up until Christmas doing my PGCE placement. I am already familiar with Tardebigge as I was a TA here two years ago and am so glad to be back! I have had such a good week getting to know all the children in year 4 and observing the brilliant learning going on!

In English this week we have been focusing on improving our first person narratives by sharing and magpieing our ideas. Some children spoke through masks and really got into character! They have taken great care writing up their first person narratives as well as editing them to make them even better!

In Maths, we have started to add two three digit numbers together using base 10 blocks and number value counters. I have been really impressed with children remembering to rename.

We have continued to be botanists in science by writing up our celery experiment and observed that water is transported quicker in a warmer temperature.

In RE, we have been discussing the temptations Jesus faced in the desert and why he didn’t give in to them even if he really wanted to. We created water colour paintings of his time in the desert whilst resisting the temptation to eat a chocolate button placed in front of us! It was hard, especially when Mrs Stevens ate one in front of us!

Overall, it has been a fantastic week and I cannot wait to see you all soon!

There has been lots of enthusiasm about our writing this week. The children have started to plan their first person narratives based on the very beginning of ‘The Jungle Book’. They have decided which character’s point of view they will be writing from and created a boxed up plan, including the expanded noun phrases and speech they will be including.

We have been doing lots of work based on language and vocabulary choices this week and have added lots of new words to our Word Aware board, such as ‘indomitable’ to describe Mowgli, and ‘inquisitive’ to describe the wolf cubs. We do lots of actions and saying these words in silly voices to help us!

In Maths, we have been rounding numbers using number lines to help us, which has helped us visually. We have used this skill to work out an approximate answer to calculations.

Our Science topic ‘We are Botanists’ is now well underway and the children have been doing a variety of experiments. We have planted beans in plastic cups and cotton wool, so that we can observe the roots growing. We have also been experimenting the transportation of water in the stem using food dye and celery using the variable of temperature.

Have a lovely weekend everybody! See you all on Monday.

Another week has flown by! Our experience day at Ridgeway was fantastic and the children especially enjoyed the trampolining session! They asked lots of questions about life at middle school and thoroughly enjoyed the day.

The children have enjoyed focusing on the skills needed for a first person narrative, especially using personal pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ in their writing, which was from the disgruntled Zazu’s point of view after taking care of the mischievous lion cubs! They also focussed on using speech punctuation – using inverted commas, a capital letter at the beginning of speech and punctuation inside the inverted commas to finish the speech. The children were very imaginative with what they thought the character’s speech could have been (we watched the video clips with the sound muted!) For example;

“You two lovebirds are driving me crazy!” Zazu exclaimed.

“I will be the king one day. I won’t listen to a silly bird like you,” Simba boasted.

We will be working on the expanded noun phrases and speech that we will use in our Jungle Book based first person narratives next week.

In Maths, the children have been working on rounding numbers to the nearest thousand. They have drawn approximate number lines to support them with their understanding.

This week, the children learned about the parts of a plant in our Science lesson. We did more word aware work on the word ‘botany’ and created detailed sketches and observations of a plant.

In RE, we have been focussing on what religions believe about what is right and wrong. The children all identified that knowing what is good is based on feelings we have and linked their ideas back to the Golden Rule. We looked specifically at the Ten Commandments this week, playing a Pictionary game and discussing how Jews and Christians would live their lives based on each of the commandments. We also created a diamond nine grid to explore which we thought was most important.

The children enjoyed exploration of Scratch in computing and recapping the key vocabulary.

Have a wonderful weekend. See you all on Monday!

I only found out yesterday that last week’s blog had not uploaded, so I apologise again that it was late!

This week has been wonderful. In Maths, we have been ordering and comparing numbers and creating number patterns. We constantly try to challenge the children’s understanding, by asking them to ‘prove’ their answers and to ‘convince’ us that their answer is correct. The children have been using place value counters and grids to show the patterns and to compare four digit numbers. We have been practising replacing thousands for ten tens and vice versa, which will help when we come on to completing column addition and subtraction.

In English, we have been introduced to our new text type- first person narratives. We enjoyed reading ‘The True Story of the Little Pigs’ and ‘The Jungle Book’ from Rafiki’s point of view. After reading, we identified the features found in this text type and created our own success criterias that we will mark against in a couple of weeks, when the children have written their own first person narratives from a Jungle Book characters point of view. We practised some of the skills we will need for this text type – writing expanded noun phrases and punctuating speech with inverted commas.

Reading Rudyard Kipling’s version of ‘The Jungle Book’ has been extremely enjoyable. We ‘zapped’ children in our class into the story, so that it was acted out as we were reading. We have also began to read another version of ‘The Jungle Book’ (Macmillan Young Learners) and have been able to compare the two.

We have started our new Science topic ‘We are Botanists’ and our new Computing topic ‘We are Toy designers’.
I loved the RE homework that came in this week and we had very thought provoking conversations based around the following advert;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZGghmwUcbQ

Overall, a wonderful week! Enjoy the weekend and see you all on Monday.

Mrs Clarkson and I have absolutely loved getting to know my new class and the children have really started to take on the responsibility of being our Year 4 role models.

This week, we have been working on place value of four digit numbers and have created numbers presented to us in a variety of different ways, using base ten blocks, place value counters and pictorially representing the numbers. We have also been counting in thousands and twenty fives.

In English, I was blown away by the rainforest description the children created. Using their work on expanded noun phrases we did last week, after exploring our own ‘Rainforest’ down in Forest school and the many images we have studied, the children then turned these into descriptive sentences and paragraphs.

Reading the original ‘The Jungle Book’ by Rudyard Kipling in our whole class Guided Reading has been extremely enjoyable! We have had lots of interesting conversations and have enjoyed making inferences about the characters.
The children have been learning about e- safety in Computing, through watching ‘Kara and Winston’s Adventures’ and then creating an online safety interactive book using the app ‘Book Creator’.

In RE, we have been learning about ‘The Golden Rule’ and have analysed lots of quotes from different religions, all teaching people to treat others the way they would like to be treated. We got out the gold glitter to decorate our work… it was a shock to the system to have glitter everywhere in September!

Our topic work has consisted of learning about the location of rainforests and using atlases and Google Earth to assist with this. The children also became weather reporters to report on the weather in different rainforests around the world.

I am so pleased with how wonderfully Year 4 has settled back in to school. Well done for your hard work everybody!

Year 4, you have been amazing and we will really, really miss you. Enjoy looking through the image gallery! 

Enjoy your summer xx