Author: Mrs Simmonds

During this last week of the Christmas term we have been using our DT skills to make a Christmas box that we can put some flapjack in. We have looked at nets of various shapes, discovered that boxes can be made from a flat piece of card and worked out how to stick the flaps or tabs together. Finally we made flapjacks. They tasted delicious!

What a lovely evening we had at St Peter’s Church singing and performing in our KS2 carol concert. The children were absolutely brilliant and we hope we filled you all, parents and the community, with love, joy and bit of that christmassy feeling. Well done Meadow 4 you were all amazing and we are all so proud of you.

We’ve had a lovely day in Meadow 4 today. We’ve been shopping at the Secret Shop, decorating our kindness buckets, I wonder whose will be the first one to be filled? decorating a little Christmas tree and opening the first door of the advent calendar. We listened hard to hear Santa’s elves jingly bells but we haven’t yet!

We welcomed Tracy in to Year 4 from the Earth Energy Education team. She taught us lots about Solar Power and the importance of renewable energy and what non-renewable energy sources are. We enjoyed investigating circuits, using buzzers, lights and motors powered by solar cells.

For our science topic this half term we are looking at electricity. We will be creating circuits, using bulbs and motors. We will also be seeing what materials are good electrical conductors and which are not. 

In numeracy we are now looking at strategies we can use to help us with division calculations.

We have spent a lot of time looking at groups of and numbers of groups. It’s quite tricky to work out the difference between the two. We also learnt some new mathematical vocabulary like quotient, divisor and dividend.

Thank you to everyone who came in and stayed to read and listen to a Dragonologist report at the end of last half term. What a fantastic job your children did. I was so impressed with their determination to show you their very best work and to apply to their writing and presentation all of the tips and skills they had been learning about. Well done everybody.

Angie Lewin is a print artist who uses simple geometric shapes inspired from plants and flowers to create her pieces. We looked at her work and at the water colour flowers we had drawn and then created our own pieces. We used mixed media, which included oil pastels, black pen and water colours. We looked at the colour wheel and chose either complementary or harmonious colours to complete our pictures. This time we were working on a much larger scale than our first piece. So, we have been practising our skills of working on a variety of scales, identifying where colours fall on the colour wheel, choosing the right brush for the task and finding out about and exploring the work of an artist. Take a look at some of our work.

This week in numeracy we have been revisiting addition. We can now rename in the ones and tens column, with some of able to rename in the hundreds and thousands column too! We have been solving lots of problems that use our addition skills. It made us think quite hard.

Our whole class guided reading text is “The Explorer,” by Katherine Rundell

It’s a very exciting story. We have just left the children in the story trying to navigate their way down the river on a raft made by themselves, hoping not to come into contact with piranhas again. Will they get to Manus and finally make there way back home?

Silver stars are being given out for all who read aloud to the rest of the class with expression, fluency and use of punctuation. Well done everyone, you are amazing and reading a difficult text extremely well.