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.