Both Mrs Dempster and I would like to wish all of the children in Year 4 and their families a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We hope you enjoy yourselves even though Christmas will look very different this year. Stay safe and we will see you all in the new year.
Above you will find our Year 4 Christmas performance, you will need to enter the password provided separately to access the video. We hope you enjoy our singing, dancing and acting. Both Mrs Dempster and I were so proud of how the children practised, performed and coped with performing our pantomime in such a different way. We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed performing it,
In Year 4, we have been learning about emotions and how they can change when things happen. We have talked about the different emotions we may feel and how this can make our body feel and react. We have learnt different strategy’s for copying when our feelings change and what we can do to help ourselves to regulate our own emotions.
This week, we discussed anger, what makes us angry and how it makes us feel. We also discussed what anger feels like within our body and how we know that it is anger we are feeling. After establishing what anger feels like, we discussed strategies which may make us calm again including counting to ten, deep breathing and concentrating on something else. We then made glitter jars to keep in class to help us when our emotions change, we discovered that watching the glitter swirling in the jar takes our mind away from the problem and allows us to calm. It was also very fun using lots of glitter to make them!
You could make one to help you when your feelings change. All you need is a plastic bottle, water, clear glue and glitter. You could also try using glitter glue. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.
On Halloween, Year 4 were set a task to review the fairness of Smartie packs. We had to start by separating the packs into colours and working out the fractions of each colour. We then used our knowledge of adding fractions to find out whether the packs were fair. This was great practise for us.
We were very undecided whether or not they were fair as it depended on which our favourite colour was. Therefore, as a class we decided that the packs were not fair as they didn’t have an equal amount of each colour and as people have different favourites it would be best to have the same amount. Although, we did say that this wasn’t enough to put us off eating them in the future.
Above you will find our Year 4 harvest performance, you will need to enter the password provided separately to access the video. We hope you enjoy our singing and signing. Both me and Mrs Dempster were so proud of how the children practised, performed and coped with the new situation.
In Year 4, we have started our new topic all about plants. We have started learning about the different parts of a plant and the different parts of a flower. We have also began learning about their functions and why they are needed. We carefully pulled apart different plants and flowers to have a closer look.
Prior to this topic, Miss Hawtin gave all of Year 4 a sunflower plant that had just began to grow. This was so that we could have the experience of growing a plant before we started our science topic. It is great to see that some of us have done a super job of providing the plants with everything they need to grow and could even explain this to the rest of the class. For the children’s plants that didn’t grow we have reflected on why this may have been and we are going to use our plant knowledge from the topic to try again with another plant. Look at our sunflower plants.
In Year 4, we have been learning about complimentary colours in art and researching artists which used them in their paintings. We looked carefully at the work of Henri Matisse, noticing his use of colour.
We started by using primary colours, mixing them to create secondary and tertiary colours. We then learnt that complimentary colours are the colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel and are used to create bright, contrasting paintings.
We then experimented with different complimentary colours to find our favourite, looking for the two colours that worked well together.
Finally, we used our knowledge of complimentary colours to create a final piece. We sketched different flowers and painted them using colours we had mixed ourselves. Look at our wonderful display outside the classroom.
What a wonderful week Year 4 have had settling back into school! We have been working on routines, reflecting on our lockdown experiences and learning about our whole school value of this term – ‘Caring’.
Everyone has settled in really well and we are really impressed with how hard everyone has been working. This week we started reading our new story book in English – ‘Meerkat Mail’. We have enjoyed finding out where Sunny went on his travels and completed story maps to show his adventures.
Mrs Dempster and I have been so impressed with the way that all of Year 4 have returned to school. They have been so positive and have made a wonderful start to the new school year.
Well done for a great start back!
Miss Hawtin.