A busy half term in Year 4!

And so we come to the end of another very busy half term in Year 4. The children are working hard to finish off the mythical stories they have written – we hope to have them word processed and published before the end of the week!

They have also done some beautiful paintings of mermaids and made magical mermaid mirrors.

We’ve been learning more about The Romans and The Celts who lived in Britain before the Roman invasion. The class have made Celtic shields and done role-play as different individuals – stating their case, based on their jobs and position within the tribe as to whether or not the tribe should go to battle!

Time was also spent researching and learning about various Roman entertainment such gladiator fights and chariot racing. The Romans enjoyed dangerous activities that sometimes hurt or caused death of humans and animals. They worked really hard in groups to design and create models of different styles of chariots that the Romans might have used.

We had a lovely visit this half term from one of the children’s grandparents who were visiting from Minnesota. The class loved having them in and asked them lots and lots of questions! They told us all about their lives in the sometimes very cold weather and about gardening and what they grow.

Any other visitors you have who would like to come in and talk to us about their lives/jobs/hobbies – we would love to welcome them to our class. Please let me know!

Another visitor we all greatly enjoyed was David. He came to tune our steel pans and took the time to also teach us about the history of the steel pans. We all learnt so much, myself included! We are so lucky to have these wonderful instruments accessible to us. I’m even thinking of taking up lessons myself…

Internet safety day was very interesting and productive. The class impressed me with their sensible attitude and knowledge about how to be safe when using the Internet and in particular with relation to social media. The children worked in pairs to produce some very impressive posters; they were informative and very eye-catching. I hope some of you managed to see them when we displayed them outside our room.

We’ve been doing lots of practical Maths and Science too – seeing what we know about our skeletons and measuring our heights – we will turn our height data in to a bar chart in the next few days. We’ve also used the Cuisenaire rods to explore, measure and have fun with building and symmetry. There is also a growing collection of different currencies on our wall, which grew out of using real money to add and subtract and learn more about the very important decimal point! If you have any money from other countries we would love to see it – I promise it will be returned!