Category: Class 4

What a wonderful week we have had in Class 4. Highlights include our Oobleck Science investigation and a brilliant morning sketching and completing geography fieldwork next to the River Stour. At our Sports Day at Twynham on Friday afternoon, every child represented the Priory beautifully. They all tried their absolute best!

Do remember your art shirts tomorrow for this week’s Art Week, linked to the forthcoming Olympics in Japan!

It has been such a fabulous start to the final half-term in Class 4. Linked to our Teaching Live sessions, we have now written two class books (on our own types of unicorn AND an explanation guide to How to look after a Baby Unicorn) and are currently embarking on an extended story writing unit. This will be linked to our class reader, Podkin One-Ear by Kieran Larwood. A highlight of the week was definitely creating our own ‘worlds’ whilst following a mapping video tutorial by the author himself. Other special moments this week include two visits; one from Cheikh, an amazing drumming teacher. He taught us all about the djembe drums and their different sounds, as well as giving us plenty of opportunities to try it ourselves. Yesterday, Tricia from WaterWise (in partnership with Bournemouth Water) delivered a brilliant session on how our water gets to us (from our local rivers), the process of cleaning it and some top tips on saving water. This followed on from our Water Cycle and River Course learning from the previous week. In both visits, Class 4 were engaged, curious and full of questions and ideas! Lots coming up including a local fieldtrip to the harbour. Well done, Class 4.

It has been such a lovely week in Class 4 with plenty of learning highlights. Mrs Fidge’s highlight was definitely when we made ‘junk’ instruments with different pitches in Science, only to then use them to accompany our singing along to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine in Music the next day. Pupils have showed such deep understanding when appraising different Beatles songs, considering lyrics, composition, instruments and vocals, with the whole unit based around the core song of Blackbird, written to support the civil rights movement in the USA. In English, we have been inspired by the Teaching Live programme to write some outstanding non-fiction texts around our unique unicorns. We will be compiling these into a class book shortly and will share them with you! Watching Mo Salah win a 10,000m gold medal in the 2012 London Olympics and Mike Powell break the Long Jump world in 1991 at the World Championships in Tokyo really set the scene for our Maths learning where we converted between different units of measure. Amazing!

Our Learner of the Week this week is Erin, who has worked superbly across the curriculum and also produced some lovely art to brighten our classroom walls.

The highlight of our week’s learning has to be our History learning on ‘mummification’. After starting the lesson by dancing AND wrapping our friends as mummies, we used brilliant British Museum resources to understand the reasons behind mummification as well as the processes. We used this to then write ‘step by step’ instructions. Other weekly highlights include carefully considering each others’ Egyptian suspense stories and giving helpful, kind and specific feedback to move the learning forward. We worked in small groups to plan a Science investigation on how sound travels over distance and made a beautiful (if a little loud!) sound in Music, where we sang ‘Blackbird’ by the Beatles with some recorder and glockenspiel accompaniment. Using Heartsmart in PSHE, we considered the loving and supportive voices in our lives. Fantastic to meet parents over School Cloud to feed back on learning during lockdown as well as the return to school.

Thank you, Class 4.

Here is the Year 4 Spring 2 curriculum letter to parents.

We have started to learn how to programme the Crumble circuit boards in order to control ‘Sparkles’ (which allow different coloured lights to flash). We will be using our new skills to light up our 3D models of London buildings later in the term!

This week we have been learning the story of ‘Excitable Edgar’ and using our storymapping skills to remember it!

Class 4 have commenced their new project, ‘Bright Lights, Big City’. As well as learning about the history and significance of our capital city, London, we have been creating electrical circuits in preparation for our computing unit, in which we will be using ‘crumble’ circuit boards to program light bulbs. We will be incorporating these into our 3D models of famous London buildings!

Congratulations to Lily, our latest Learner of the Week! She has shown such a good work ethic in class, especially in her Greek myth hot task.