Hello everyone,

We hope that you are all well and keeping safe. At St. Peter’s, we have been feeling very excited as we have continued the count down to Christmas. This morning, the children participated in a drama workshop called the Elves and the Shoemaker – they had a wonderful time joining in with the music and dancing! Last week, the Year Four took part in a Christmas jumper day to support the Save the Children charity – a big thank you to all families who generously provided a tin can for the food banks. Please see the picture below:

In English, we have completed our transformation stories on Anthony Browne’s The Tunnel. Year Four had a very creative selection of ideas for portals and methods of travel, with a strong selection of fronted adverbials, prepositional language and speech punctuation. Well done Year Four! After Christmas, we look forward to working on a range of other texts including Winter poetry, Jemmy Button and Stitch Head… Are you able to pre-read any of these stories over Christmas? Are there any Winter poems you have read over the holidays that you would like to share with us in January?

In Maths, Year Four have been learning about geometry. For example, the children have completed a shape investigation by looking at the angles and types of lines across objects across the classroom and within sets of flags. As a challenge, they then had a go at creating their very own flag with a set criteria of shape properties. After the Christmas holidays, we look forward to learning about how to tell the time to the nearest 5 minutes and 1 minute. Can you have a practise of this at home? Perhaps you could try to make a timetable of your own, to show the order of each of the exciting events you got up to over the course of your Christmas day?

Just a few quick reminders for the children for when they return to school in January:

• First day back to school will be Monday 4th January 2021.
• PE will take place on Monday 4th January for the afternoon session, so please ensure your child arrives to school in their full PE kit.
• Spelling, vocabulary and reading journals to be handed in on Thursday 7th January 2021 please.

We hope that you all have a peaceful and safe half term, and look forward to seeing you all again in the New Year.

Take care and best wishes to you all,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns.

Hello everyone,

We hope you are all having a lovely week so far.

We would like to start by thanking you all for the fantastic reading and the time that went into children’s reading passports for this Autumn term. What a turn out it was for year four, especially Koalas who brought in 30/32 passports! Record breaking! Well done to Kangaroos who also recieved a fantastic turnout. Keep your eyes peeled for the Spring reading passport challenge. I wonder whether we can get a full house!

Miss Jackson-Nash managed to snap a pictures of the children’s reactions.

…And the winners are Koalas!

In English, the children have been continuing to explore Anthony Browne’s book ‘The Tunnel’. They are now putting together a plan so that they can start to write their own ‘transportation’ story. The skills we will be using include expanded noun phrases, adverbs, show not tell words (such as hands tremebling to show the character was scared) and speech with accurate puncuation.

In Maths, the children have been working hard on their fraction work. We have explored different equivalent fractions, the effect of dividing numbers by 1/2 , 1/4 , 1/3, and noticing patterns when dividing by 10, 100, 1000. Next week we will be starting our geometry unit which wll include christmas symmetry and to find Father Christmas by using coordinates and translations.

Some quick reminders –

• Friday 11th December 2020- Christmas Jumper Day. Please send children in with a christmas jumper and we ask that you kindly donate a can of food to go towards our christmas foodbank.
• Monday 14th December 2020 – As Koalas (4JN Miss Jackson-Nash’s class) won the reading passport challenge, they have been rewarded an afternoon session with CM sports. So please ensure that children in 4JN come into school with their warm PE kits.
• Tuesday 15th December 2020 – Year 4 Christmas dinner.
• Thursday 17th December 2020-  Last day of term for the children.
• Friday 18th December 2020 – Inset day.
•  Spellings, vocabulary homework, online maths homework and reading journals to be in by Thursday 17th December.

We hope that you have a lovely and restful weekend. We look forward to seeing the children for one last busy week of the Autumn term.

Miss Jackson-Nash, Miss Honeywell and Mrs Cairns

Hello everyone,

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

This week, we have begun to learn about Anthony Browne’s “The Tunnel”. The children have really enjoyed working with their learning partners to create their own role play between the two key characters in the story. As the week progressed, the children learnt how to use inverted commas to accurately punctuate the speech for their characters. Year Four had a lot of fun using actions and gestures to learn a ‘speech rhyme’ that has supported their learning. Well done everyone! Next week, we look forward to using time and place adverbials to add detail to each of our transformation stories. Do you know of any books or films where a character travels to a magical place?

In Maths, we have been working very hard on our learning of decimals and fractional amounts of a whole. We have made links to the context of money to help the children to understand tenths and hundredths, e.g. £1.79 is made of 1 whole, 7 tenths and 9 hundredths. Both classes have used number lines, bar models and partitioning in order to represent the tricky problems they have been given, particularly when adding and subtracting decimals. Towards the end of the week, Year Four learnt about conversion and how we can use fractions to record our answers e.g. 0.6 + o.2 = 0.8, or 6/10 + 2/10 = 8/10.

On Friday, we are very excited to take part in a STEM day on building structures. We shall be taking a look at and researching famous bridges to find out how to make a strong structure of our own. Have you visited any famous bridges? Can you remember what they are called? What shapes did you see?

A few quick reminders for next week:

• Reading Passport deadline is on Wednesday 9th December 2020. Well done to all of the children who have already handed in their completed passport challenges.
• Christmas jumper day will be on Friday 11th December 2020. Please bring a tin can of food, as a donation for this charity day.
• Weather permitting, PE will be on the afternoon of Monday 7th December so please ensure your child attends school wearing their PE kit on this date.

We hope that you all have a safe and pleasant weekend,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns.