Hello,

We hope you all have had a lovely week and hopefully the sun will shine for us at the weekend.

This week it was fantastic to see all the amazing characters children dressed as for World Book Day. It really is a super way for children to share their favourite books and encourage others to read!

In English, year 4 all week have been perfecting and publishing their ‘Save the world’ letters and they are ready to send off to Greta Thunberg! For the next English unit, which will start on Monday, children will be investigating natural disasters in order to create a news report for the camera!

In Maths, Koalas have worked really hard perfecting addition and subtraction problems. We looked at a range of multi-step problems where they had to determine what steps to take first and what operation to use. Next week we will begin our next ‘Time’ unit and focusing on time intervals and crossing time boundaries (e.g. I baked a cake at 11.53 am and it took 16 minutes to cook. What time will it be ready?)

During science, each class created an entire set of human teeth! We used clay and modelling tools to discuss the shape of each tooth and how this would be suitable for its purpose. We discussed how incisors are used to bite, canines help us to shred meats and the (pre)molars allow us to chew foods. We then studied a set of animal photos and compared the types of teeth they had, before categorising each animal into carnivore, herbivore or omnivore. Not to forget the importance of keeping our teeth healthy and making our own coloured toothpaste!

Next Tuesday we will be learning all about how to stay safe in the kitchen and learn the skills of grating, chopping and peeling. We are hoping to create some veggie masterpieces just like these…

So if you have any leftover, uncooked vegetables from Sunday roast and dinners over the weekend, we would really appreciate it.

Quick reminders for the upcoming week,

Tuesday 10th March – Parent’s evening

Wednesday 11th March – Parent’s evening

Friday 13th March – Poetry of by heart competition (So if you’ve been chosen, do not forget to bring your props)

We hope you have a lovely weekend and we are looking forward to seeing you on Monday!

Miss Jackson-Nash, Miss Honeywell and Mrs Cairns

Hello,

We hope that you have all been having a good week so far and that you have been enjoying the moments of sunshine this weekend!

This week, the children took part in an Ash Wednesday service at St. Peter’s Catholic Primary school on Wednesday 26th February 2020. The service provided an excellent opportunity for our whole school community to join together in prayer and worship. Ashes were distributed as a symbol of God’s forgiveness of our sins, which enabled us to then embark upon our spiritual journey of 40 days and nights until the celebration of Easter. The children had behaved respectfully during this service and they were each able to make their own Lenten promises to Jesus during the calm moments of reflection across the service. Please see the photos below…

On Friday 28th February 2020, the children had an exciting visit from a children’s theatre and drama company. The Robin Hood workshop was a fun opportunity for the children to work in groups and take part in a variety of games and speaking and listening activities. In particular, Year Four enjoyed taking on the role of different characters in the story as the class created freeze frames for individual scenes. Please see photos of the workshop below…

In Maths, the children have been learning how to use a variety of different strategies to add three numbers together. Through the context of money and ‘cinema combination’ problems, both classes have been learning how to identify number bonds to 10p and 100p (or £1) across sets of numbers, using colouring pencils to ‘match’ bonds together to support the mental addition of money values in pence. Where the problem solving tasks involved the ‘carrying’ of numbers across tens or hundreds boundaries, each class then identified the ‘expanded column’ method as an appropriate strategy for solving 3-part addition sentences. As the week progressed, Year Four used metacognitive strategies such as ‘evaluate’ and ‘number talk’ to discuss the suitability of their chosen strategies for various challenge tasks that had involved the use of addition. Next week, we look forward to revisiting our learning on subtraction through the use of ‘smart jumps’ (e.g. 148 – 39 can be solved by calculating 148 – 40 + 1) and expanded column subtraction (including the use of exchanges for hundreds and tens values where necessary).

In English, the children have continued their learning on Climate Change. This week, Year Four have planned and drafted their persuasive letters to Greta – next week, we look forward to editing, publishing, then evaluating our final pieces of writing before posting them to Greta Thunberg! We have been delighted by the children’s awareness and interest towards matters such as Global Warming, the burning of Fossil Fuels, plastic waste in the sea and the rapid Deforestation of our Tropical Rainforests. As a result, our students have produced a selection of passionate and factual letters that shall no doubt encourage Greta Thunberg to continue her campaigns and encourage others around the world to take better care of the environment. We would like to say a big well done to all of the children in Year Four, for their excellent use of Climate Change key words, facts and statistics in their writing.

We look forward to seeing you all on Monday – don’t forget to complete your Spring Term Reading passports as well as your spelling, Sumdog and Times Table Rock star homeworks for this week!

With best wishes,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns.

Hello,

We hope that you are having a good week so far and that the children are enjoying the first day of their February half term break.

This week, Year 4 have been learning about how to use a variety of conjunctions and key facts to inform a reader. In particular, we have been learning how to use co-ordinating, subordinating and causal conjunctions – these skills have been practised through the use of debates and ‘conscience alley’, whereby the children used their climate change sentences to persuade a friend to purchase an electric car instead of a diesel super car. As the week progressed, we then considered how relative clauses could also be used to add further information e.g. statistics, percentages and other facts. We were delighted with the range of informative sentences that were created by Year 4, regarding Global Warming, Deforestation, Fossil Fuels and Plastics in the Sea. Well done everyone!

In Maths, we have been working on using a range of different strategies in order to calculate fractions of an amount. This has enabled the children to complete a variety of comparison questions (e.g. ‘Which is more and which is less, 2/3 of 36 sweets or 3/5 of 25 sweets?’) and place value tasks (e.g. ‘If I know 2/4 of 12, I can calculate 2/4 of 120 by multiplying my answer by 10, as 120 is ten times bigger than 12 and the fraction of the amount is the same’). We were very impressed by the children’s use of reasoning skills when selecting their strategies for solving, which included: bar models, trial/error, arrays, partitioning (part-part whole), number lines and even ’10 times bigger or smaller’. Both classes had demonstrated true resilience across these challenge tasks, taking care to ensure their presentation was neat and their selection of strategy was appropriate.

Last week, we had a fantastic time during our STEM day. Year Four worked in groups to create their very own terrarium-style animal habitat. Each team thought very carefully about how they could show a cross section of their habitat, which was carefully designed to ensure their chosen creature could survive. Please take a look at the photos of our work, below:

We hope that you all have a great break and we look forward to seeing you all after the holidays.

Best wishes,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns

Hello everyone,

We hope you have had a fantastic week and enjoying the slightly brighter mornings!

This week, the children have been working extremely hard in Maths focusing on solving problems with increasingly harder fractions. Revisiting Fractions this term gave children the opportunity to show off all of their strategies and different ways to represent these fractions. These included bar models, numberlines, arrays and many more. Next week, we are going to continue to solve problems but with a clearer focus on word and multistep to really challenge year 4.

In English, we started a new unit with a letter from Greta Thunberg. It was amazing to see the reaction of Koalas and Kangaroos and how passionate they are about looking after the Earth and God’s creations. Throughout the next couple of weeks, the children are going to gather facts about our environments, go on a local study around the school to see the threats on habitats in order for them to write a persuasive letter to inform the world on how we can save our environment and the importance of acting now!

Tomorrow, Friday 7th is STEM day and we are all really excited to create our own Biomes. Children all week have been bringing in resources and coming up with ideas that they want to do for their micro habitats. A quick thanks for all the resources the children have brought in already, and thankyou for any future resources!

Some reminders for next week ;

Friday 7th February – Stem Day

Wednesday 12th February – Classroom Poetry Competition – Kids, get your props ready!

Thursday 13th February – Last day of half term!

Friday 14th February – Inset Day

Monday 24th February – First day back of Spring 2.

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Miss Jackson-Nash, Miss Honeywell and Mrs Cairns

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

Hello,

We hope that you are all well and that your Christmas preparations have been successful and productive so far.

This week, the children have been drafting, editing and publishing their concrete Christmas poems, which have taken the shape of a Christmas image e.g. a tree, star, Santa Claus, etc. We were delighted by the children’s use of poetic devices to entertain the reader e.g. metaphor, simile, alliteration, rhyme, repetition and exaggeration. Well done Year Four! Both classes then took part in a peer-evaluation (2 stars and 1 wish) in order to give constructive feedback to one another about their poems. Today, we enjoyed using musical instruments as part of our Y4 Christmas Poetry Performance – we also discussed the importance of using pitch, tempo, voice intonation, facial expression and gestures, as means to engage an audience during the final outcome of our English unit.

In Maths, we have continued to learn about fractions. In particular, we have been working on tenths and hundredths of a number (i.e. 0.1 and 0.01), before moving on to discover what happens when a fraction becomes larger than 1 whole (e.g. three halves described as ‘1 and a 1/2’). As the week progressed, Year Four then began to look at equivalent fractions, through building their own fraction walls using strips of paper and folding techniques to create equal parts of a whole. We were very impressed by the children’s collaboration during this task! The children were then able to derive their own ‘equivalent facts’ for 1/2 and 1/4, using their fraction walls. Now, we are working on how to add and subtract fractions together by finding a common denominator…

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all parents who attended the Y4 music concert at St. Peter’s on Monday 16th December 2019. The children felt very supported and they all enjoyed demonstrating to an audience the skills they have been learning on the keyboard this term. In the Spring Term, we look forward to learning about percussion on the African drums! Please see photos from our recent concert, below…

We would also like to thank all children and parents for the lovely Christmas cards and gifts that our staff have received this week – we are extremely grateful for your kindness and generosity, thank you!

Please remind all children to complete their spelling, vocabulary, times tables and Sumdog learning, ready for the new year…

Wishing you all a fantastic Christmas, see you next term on Monday 6th January 2020!

Kind regards,

Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns

Hello everyone,

We hope you have had a pleasant week and keeping yourself warm and dry from the wet weather!

This week year 4 have really started to feel the Christmas spirit.  In Religious Education at school, we have explored what advent is, why it is so important and how to prepare our selves in time for Christmas day. During prayer time, each child has reflected on what they have learnt which is always lovely to see. Alongside this the Advent Carol service that was held at Church of the Sacred Heart and St Peter the Apostle in Waterlooville, we would like to thank everyone who came along and a big well done to all the children to joined in. It was a fantastic performance!

But the excitement doesn’t stop there!, we would also like to thank Oaklands Year 9 dance class for inviting year 4 to a dance workshop. The Kangaroo’s and Koala’s had a wonderful time learning the bop and jive whilst dancing to rock ‘n’ roll.

In English, we have started our poetry unit. We read a range of poems and identified different poetic devices then discussed the purpose of each. In Maths, we have been exploring the effect of dividing numbers by 10 and 100, delving into tenths and hundredths. We also look at how decimals can turn into fractions and then how we can add and subtract those fractions.

We are very proud of all the progress the children have made this term. There is only one more week left of autumn term so although next week will still be full of learning, there are some fun events coming up to celebrate their hard work.

Friday 13th December – Christmas Jumper day. (We are asking for a can of tin food as a donation which will go towards a food bank for the community)

Monday 16th December – Year 4 Keyboard Concert. At 2.15pm we welcome all parents to watch year 4 music concert.

Tuesday 17th December – Christmas Dinner!

Thursday 19th December – Last Day!

Friday 20th December – Inset Day!

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Kind regards,

Miss Jackson-Nash, Miss Honeywell and Mrs Cairns