Hello,

We hope that you have all been having a good week so far, despite the January weather!

In English, we have been drafting, editing and publishing our jungle stories. We have been delighted by the children’s use of metaphors, similes, fronted adverbials and expanded noun phrases, when describing and comparing the jungle and city life. The children have worked exceptionally hard, when editing and improving their stories with a green biro. We look forward to putting these on display in the school hall and in the Year 4 shared area. Well done Year 4! Next week, we shall begin our new unit of learning: writing a persuasive letter to Greta Thunberg, persuading her to continue her campaigns to encourage others to protect the environment. Can you research on the internet this weekend to find out more about her work?

In Maths, we have been learning about measure. Specifically, we have been learning how to convert between lengths (mm, cm, m and km) and mass (g and kg). During the week, the children were taught how to use a ‘function machine’ (place value grid) in order to help them to divide and multiply numbers by 10, 100 and 1000. Both classes were then given an opportunity to apply their learning to a set of challenge tasks, e.g. ‘Which combination of fruits could you buy, to get as close to 2kg as you possibly can?’ Next week, we look forward to revisiting our learning on fractions. In particular, we shall be exploring equivalent fractions before moving on to finding unit (1/3) and non-unit (2/3) fractions of an amount within a problem solving context.

On Tuesday 28th January 2020, Year 3 and 4 took part in Mass together to celebrate the Revelation of Christ through His miracles and the Word of God. We would like to thank all parents and church parishioners who were able to attend this event and celebrate with us. By the end of the week, the children also had an exciting opportunity to use the school IT suite and take part in a Scratch coding activity (called ‘Imagine a World’) on the Hour of Code website. After reading an information fact file about the Scratch programme, the children worked in small groups to create a set of their own instructions for a Sprite character. Please see the photos below for creative examples that the children have made…

We hope that you have a wonderful weekend. Please remind the children to log on to their Sumdog and Times Table Rock star accounts for their Maths and Times Table practise. We shall also be collecting spelling and vocabulary homework next Friday. We would also like to request that children bring in a small selection of materials for one of the following habitats that they shall be making in class next week…

• Desert (e.g. sand, stones, pebbles, twigs).
• Rainforest (e.g. leaves, blades of grass, flowers).
• Arctic (e.g. cotton wool, bubble wrap, ice cube bags).
• Caves (e.g. pipe cleaners, pebbles, small plastic insects).

We look forward to seeing you all next week,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns.

Hello everyone,

We hope you have not got too wet from the rainy weather and enjoyed your weekend.

Last week in English, the years 4 brought all their writing skills together that we have explored over this past unit top create and edit their writing plans. The children will be writing their own narrative  of Jemmy Button in first person. We have had a large focus on different sentence types to make our writing more exciting and intriguing to the reader. This week children will be using their plans to draft and edit their stories. We cannot wait to read them!

In Maths, we have started to look at measurements. Starting with length last week we explored what different measurements their were and how to convert these from km all the way to mm. This week  we will be starting to look at Mass and its different conversion, allowing the children to see the similar links between mass and length (km/kg).

In Science, we have started our new topic ‘Living things and their Habitats). The lesson started off with a sorting race whereby they had to place the animal into the correct animal group (mammals, reptiles, amphibians etc)  and the children cheered each other, helping one another. Now they understand what groups of animals their are and the characteristics that go along side the animals, we will start to explore their habitats. In the next couple of weeks we will be creating our own micro-habitats such as dessert, Antarctica, rain forests, woodland, the ocean etc. It would be really appreciated if children could bring in some resources to go into their micro- habitats, from twigs, to stones, sand, leaves, ‘ice’.

We’re hearing that many of  the children are doing well at learning and performing their poems. We will be holding our Poetry Performance on 12th February, so if you are using costumes or props, that’s the day to bring them in. Looking forward to seeing them all!

We would also like to thank you for your support with the children’s multiplication. Both classes in year 4 have seen a big improvement in the accuracy and fluency of their time table recall. Please do continue to practise with children and here are a few useful sites we use with the children for times tables.

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/daily10

https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/resource/477/Multiplication-Tables-Check

Sumdog and Times table Rockstar.

We hope you have a lovely week!

Miss Jackson-Nash, Miss Honeywell and Mrs Cairns

Hello,

We hope that you have all had a good week so far.

On Wednesday, we were fortunate enough to have a very special guest speaker visit our school. Mr. Chris Lubbe, who had been a personal body guard for Nelson Mandela, came to St. Peter’s to speak to Years 4-6 about the Apartheid, Racism and Mutual Respect. He shared many stories about his inspirational journey and described how it felt to live in a segregated community. Chris informed us that he had promised Mandela to continue his work, by visiting schools, colleges and universities to educate young people about equality and the need to respect one another regardless of any differences we may have. After the assembly, there was a 20 minute Q&A session which enabled the children to ask Chris any particular questions they wished to raise, following the morning assembly. Please see the photos below…

In English, the children have been learning about speech dialogue and how this may be used to develop the plot line of a story. In particular, we selected two pivotal moments from our ‘Jemmy Button’ story – we then used role-play and dialogue to pretend to be the characters from the story and generate our own conversation that we felt would have taken place. As the week progressed, we then revisited our learning on speech punctuation, using our special speech rhyme and actions to help us remember the key rules when recording direct speech. For an additional challenge, the children then had a go at switching the order of their sentences (detail first, then dialogue, e.g. Jemmy whispered quietly, “Are you sure?”) and even successfully managed to include additional narrative detail between dialogue entries, to show what each character was thinking to themselves as the conversation developed. Well done Year Four!

In Maths, we have continued to learn about time. Specifically, we have focused upon telling the time to the nearest 5 minute and 1 minute intervals, before then moving on to conversion problems about time. During these sessions, both classes discussed the ‘scale’ around a clock and then identified how the numbers around a clock face were similar to a number line with equal jumps. By the end of our learning this unit, we looked at digital time and used interactive resources to help us compare and convert between analogue, digital and 24 hour time. We were very impressed by the commitment that had been demonstrated by each class, when partaking in a variety of tricky Maths challenge problems across the week.

We look forward to seeing you all next week.

Kind regards,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns.

Hello,

We all hope you had a fantastic Christmas and a well deserved break! It was lovely to see all the children back in on Monday, keen to learn and get back into a school routine and what a great first week back it was!

The children have started a new topic called Island Hoppers which will take us through most of the Spring term. Here year 4 closely look at different islands, comparing places and studying volcanoes. In English the book we will be studying is Jemmy Button by Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali. It is a true story of a young Native boy from a tribe in South America who was invited to come to England in the hopes to be civilised, however though he was draped in all the finest clothing and experienced England’s greatest cultures, he felt a part of him was missing and Charles Darwin returned him home. This is a great English hook as we have been able to compare the different settings and use our inference skills to justify why Jemmy was feeling certain ways.

In Maths, Koalas and Kangaroos have been learning all about time. This weeks focus has been on o’clocks, half pasts, quarter past, quarter to and nearest 5 minutes. We have been really impressed with the children perseverance this week as Time is always a tricky concept to grasp. So keep up the good work Year 4.

This week children have been given their poetry competition books, where they are allowed to chose a poem to practise and then later [perform to the class. Alongside this they have been given their Spring reading passports. Altogether Year 4 had a very impressive number of children who completed the Autumn Term with oly a few off the winning class, so lets continue to encourage children with their home reading. The teachers at St Peters are always happy to help find books or articles for children to help them complete this.

As usual homework has been handed out and we expect children to bring this back on Friday 17th, we were very happy with the amount of children who brought back their homework after the Christmas break as we appreciate this time of the month is very busy.

We hope you have a lovely weekend,

Miss Jackson-Nash, Miss Honeywell and Mrs Cairns