I absolutely loved the Easter parade and concert this morning; it is always absolutely wonderful to see the effort that has gone into the bonnets and crosses; enjoy looking through the photos! The singing in church today was amazing as always- I am sure you will agree.

A huge thank you to Mr Stabler, who led such an exciting, fun day on Wednesday, giving us all the opportunity to become engineers. The children were challenged to design a sports hall for Tardebigge and a bridge to access it across the canal. We were really impressed with the ideas the children had and really wish that one of the amazing designs could actually be built. We absolutely loved building our bridge designs and were amazed when the bridge was able to hold 102 books from our book shelf! I am going to be adding midget gems and cocktail sticks to my food shop list this week, as we were all really engaged by the challenge of building the tallest structure with them and this was a brilliant opportunity for the children to display perseverance and team work.

I cannot believe that when the children come back after Easter they will be in their final term at Tardebigge First School and that they will know which middle schools they will be going to in September! We are also looking forward to welcoming back Miss Cooke, who will be completing her final placement at Tardebigge. The children are all very excited to have her back!

Happy Easter- enjoy a long break and lots of chocolate eggs.

P.s I hope everybody is just as excited for Condover as I am!

We have had a brilliant week in Year 4!

The children have really been enjoying an extract from the book ‘Niteracy Hour’ about a head-louse named Jim. We talked about strategies the author used to convince us to like Jim, including humour, Jim’s personality and authorial intrusion. We particularly liked the conversation he had with another head louse and the effect that dialogue had on the reader. As speech punctuation is our class next step we decided to write a similar ‘conversation’.

As part of our topic, we have been learning about why the Ancient Egyptians worshipped scarab beetles. The children have been researching facts about dung beetles and used two dung beetles to write a conversation between. We are working on building this into a short narrative piece of writing.
In Maths, we have really challenged ourselves this week with some tricky problem solving. The children are becoming far more confident with representing problems in the bar model and this has really helped to work out what calculation needs to be done. As part of our daily dashboard, we have been practising time problems and converting time to the 24 hour clock.

Our Scientist at the moment is Isaac Newton and we have been finding out about his discoveries about light. The children created a Newton colour wheel, discovering what happened when we span the wheel really quickly! The children were also introduced to the ‘tasc’ wheel (Thinking Actively in Social Contexts) which helped us to develop some child- led experiments based on shadows.

Have a good weekend everyone!

I think the Mother’s Day concert was my absolute favourite one I have seen while I have been at Tardebigge, as I just loved the diversity of all the songs performed and the whole school performing ‘Sing’ blew me away! The children only had two days to practise their ‘Treat your mother right’ rap song, but we had so much fun rehearsing. I’m sure that you will agree that it was hilarious! It was also lovely to see the children enjoying the activities with their family members; a really special morning.

In Maths, the children have been using the bar model to represent problems involving multiplication, including ‘times bigger than.’ In English, they have written a diary entry from Howard Carter’s point of view, using effective vocabulary and phrases to describe emotions. Examples the children were really proud of included; ‘a sense of elation’, ‘adrenaline pumped around my body’, ‘my heart pounded with exhilaration and nerves.’ We added all of these ideas onto our ‘Borrow it’ board, so that others could magpie to use in their writing.

The children have absolutely loved learning about dung/ scarab beetles and researching them this week- we have had a lot of fun!

Overall, a brilliant week. Fingers crossed the sunshine will continue over the weekend; it has been lovely to have playtime on the field today! See you next week.

This week, the children have written the blog! I have copied and pasted bits from each of their writing to put together below;

Our Blog

This week it has been British science week, so the lovely teachers planned lots of fun activities for us to do. This morning some scientists from Birmingham University came in to our class, and we made banana DNA. We all really enjoyed it when we got to help make it, but we got really messy! We also made water lilies to see and created our own investigations to see what would happen if we changed the size or the depth of the water or different liquids to see if they would still open. After, we took a lot of time cleaning the tables because they got very wet during this science investigation!
On Tuesday, we did another science experiment with the science leaders leading it this time, and we made seaweed slime. But it was not a slime at all because it did not stretch at all. (It looked like a big splat of disgustingness!) Some children went to the Science St John’s trip. They loved it there they said they had lots of fun testing fibres.

On Wednesday, we made static electricity with PVC pipes and towels to do a can roll with a can and lots of other cool things and then we made hover boards out of CD’s fruit shoot caps and blue tack so we did a bit of recycling. We couldn’t believe it when we went into the hall to see a real life hover board and some children even got to go on it!

After school, we did after school activities with the parents, which was really fun and we taught them some tasks.

We enjoyed completing a light sources experiment in the cupboard to find our cuddly orangutan and then we were able to find the best light source which was the torch.

Today, some children are going to meet a real life astronaut and ask him about space travel. We are very excited to see pictures and videos of him.

I have had a few problems with the blog uploading the blog the last few weeks, so fingers crossed it will work properly today! I think I have updated last weeks as I think only half loaded.

Thank you for your attendance at Parent’s Evening this week- it is always lovely to discuss the progress that the children have made over the year. I am really proud of all of the children.

We loved World Book Day! It was such good fun to guess which nursery rhyme characters the children were dressed as and the costumes were so imaginative. We very much enjoyed the hilarious catwalk at the start of the morning and then writing diary entries for the characters we came dressed as. The children also performed their nursery rhymes, thinking about intonation, volume and actions. Throughout the day, the Grand Old Duke of York came round the school with a horn to signal that we had reading time. The children thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to read for pleasure and also were pleased to finish Kensuke’s Kingdom, which has really engaged them over the past few weeks.

In English, we have been working on diary entries and we immersed ourselves in the new text type, reading lots of different examples, including our own school log book diary, which dates back 157 years! The children have had lots of engaging conversations about the purpose of diaries.

In Maths, the children have continued to work on multiplication of three digit numbers, focussing on the standard, compact method and problems based on this.

Enjoy looking through the World Book Day photos! Have a good weekend!

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN TO SEE THIS WEEK'S BLOG! (8.3.19)

It is lovely to have everybody back at school after half term!
We are so proud of the sportsmanship and growth mind-set the children who took part in the Cross Country Finals displayed today. The children really did well and competing in the finals was a huge achievement. It was so exciting to watch!
The children at school had a lovely afternoon helping with Computing in Reception; Mrs Hartle was very appreciative of their help.
I am so proud of the effort I have seen from the children in our Maths this week. We have been working on multiplying by multiples of 100 in a variety of ways, such as arrays with our 100 place value counters, using place value grids, repeated addition and using the sentence stem below;
………. Hundreds x …… = ………. Hundreds=
For example 700 x 4 =
7 hundreds x 4 = 28 hundreds = 2800
The children then multiplied three digit numbers using partitioning.

Before half term, the children began writing their Egyptian Cinderella stories. This week, the children have been practising the skill of editing to improve and then re drafted their final piece of work in handwriting pen. They finally were able to share their stories with an audience today and read them to Year 1 children, which was lovely to see. The focus was reading with good expression, intonation and at a good volume and it was so special to see the Year 1 children enjoying the writing our class had produced.
In our topic, we have been learning about mummification. We have completed a Scientific experiment to see the effect of drying out an apple with ‘natron’ just like the Egyptians would have done with bodies. We have one very horrible- looking, brown apple for us to compare it too in a separate container that the children have been observing daily!
As February was Michael Morpurgo month, we have been reading extracts from Kensuke’s Kingdom, which has captivated the children. We have been doing so much inference work throughout hearing the story and of course, the children loved the mention of the orangutans on the island!
Overall, a brilliant first week back! Enjoy the weekend.

Happy half term! I cannot believe how quickly the half term has whizzed by.

We have had an enjoyable week in Year 4 and everybody’s writing has really impressed me. I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of the versions of ‘The Egyptian Cinderella’. All of the children have made suitable adaptations to the original in order to make it appropriate for an Ancient Egypt setting. I have loved the similes, expanded noun phrases, speech and fronted adverbials that they have selected.

As it is online safety week, we have been having lots of discussions and work around e- safety. We have been doing a lot of computing and have continued to work on our Scratch quiz projects, adding motion, new costumes for our Sprites and backgrounds.

In our Dyson Science, the children have created prototypes for their new classroom designs. I actually think we might use lots of them- they will all be very useful! I have kept the white board pen with an attached whiteboard rubber to use myself and the ruler with grip on is such a good invention!

I hope everybody has a wonderful half term- it sounds as though lots of you have exciting plans!

Wow! Year 4 managed to raise over £150 today and are excited to donate this money to help save orangutans and their habitat. They have really enjoyed learning about how WWF helps orangutans by reading their newsletters this week and about the orangutans they will be sponsoring.

The children made us so proud this week at Cross Country! They really displayed a good growth mindset and completing the very muddy course was a huge achievement in itself. We are really pleased, not only with where the children placed, but also the sportsmanship and attitiude they showed. Well done to the children who made it to the finals! 

The children have been requesting to have their tables laid out in rows, facing forward and you would not believe how happy they are with this new table layout! The children have been commenting on how it is easier to focus and so we are trialing this for a while.
In Maths, we have been continuing our work on multiplication and division and practising using the bar model to represent the problems we have needed to solve.
In English, the children have been writing their first draft of their Egyptian Cinderella stories. I am very much looking forward to reading them!

The children have enjoyed the Dyson design engineer topic we have been doing. We enjoyed watching the Heinz advert and discussing the characteristics of the ‘Head of Innovation’ in the video clip (link below) We also followed the same process in completing a design specification and a production plan. We have all sorts of ideas for how we will be improving items in the classroom, such as anti- slip rulers, whiteboard pens with a rubber on the end, attached whiteboard cleaner spray bottles on our whiteboard rubbers etc.

In our Computing session, we have been using Scratch to create an algorithm for a simple educational quiz. I was very pleased that lots of the children focused on
multiplication, but we have a wide variety of different themes. I am looking forward to seeing these ideas develop.

Overall, a very good week in Year 4! Have a good weekend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dulk2rBSKkQ

We have been very productive in Year 4 this week, despite our excitement about the snow we were expecting last night!

The children have moved onto solving problems in Maths, which has really challenged everybody, especially when working out what calculations we are required to do in a two or three step word problem. We have used the bar model as a pictorial representation to help us understand the problem and the children have become far more confident with this over the week.

In Guided Reading, we have read Ye Xian (the Chinese version of Cinderella) and identified all of the differences. This has enabled the children to come up with ideas for their Egyptian version and they have been doing lots of research about Ancient Egyptian celebrations, gods, celebrations, clothing etc to support with this. I am looking forward to seeing the children’s ideas develop.

Our new RE topic ‘What is it like to be a Hindu in Britain today?’ has been very interesting and we have compared Christian beliefs about the Trinity, with Hindu beliefs of Brahman and the Trimurti. The children have looked at examples of art work and have tried to represent the gods all interlinked to show one god. They used pastels to demonstrate their understanding of this concept.

In Science, we have continued to enjoy our Dyson lessons and learning about how to become design engineers. The children have come up with a design specification in order to improve an everyday existing item. There have been lots of imaginative ideas, as I’m sure you can imagine!

Have a good weekend!

Overall a brilliant week in Year 4!

We have been very much enjoying learning about traditional tales, especially comparing different versions of Cinderella, including a Caribbean and Chinese version. They children have been practising skills that they will need for writing this text type, such as using similes and fronted adverbials of place. The children have really worked hard on their use of descriptive language to paint a picture in the readers mind.

In Maths, we have worked on dividing numbers with remainders. We have used concrete resources to physically share and recording this by demonstrating grouping pictorially. We have continued to practise multiplication tables in order to help with this too.

In our Science this week, we have been doing some child led investigations. One of the questions a group wanted to test is; ‘Do dogs have a favourite colour?’ The children planned to test this with three pieces of coloured card and a dog treat on top of the card. We let Maisie off her lead and recorded which colour she went to, to eat the treat from first. At the end we determined that although we thought Maisie might have a preference for the colour blue the experiment would need to be tested with lots of dogs to see.
The children are going to repeat the experiment at home with their own dog, or a family/ friends dog. We also talked about how it would be interesting to try the experiment out with other animals, so please feel free to try this if the children would like to, or if you don’t know of a dog to try out the experiment with!

We have had lots of conversations this week leading up to Holocaust Memorial day, using clips from Newsround as a starting point. The children have been very contemplative during these discussions.
Have a good weekend!