Welcome to Year 4
Mrs Dowdall's class.
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On our first day back in 2017 the children in Year 4 had a very different day. As this was a theme throughout the school, year 4 children were invited to teach a lesson to the rest of the class. There were some amazing ideas which included;
How to count to 10 in Yoruba, German, Russian, Norweigan, Greek, Sinhale, Bulgarian,Hindi, Bengali and Spanish.
In Italian we learned to count to twelve and add and subtract, in French we learned numbers up to 40 and had a quiz. Finally on the counting theme we learned how to count to 100 in American sign language.
Other lessons included making a fortune teller and origami pot, how to draw a cartoon character and how to turn the word 'boy' into a boy.
We had presentations about logos and had the opportunity to create our own, were tested about the world's flags and also given tips on how to learn your nine times table. For those budding James Bonds amongst us we were taught a secret language and our grand finale was a science experiment which created an in house volcano.
The children worked really hard to make thier lessons interesting and as you can see from the photographs we have some budding teachers out there!
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On Thursday 15th December, Y4 walked down to Mount Grace to take part in a problem solving afternoon. The afternoon had been prepared and was being run by year ten pupils and there were lots of really varied activies to challenge the children.
Before the children started, they were organised into groups and mixed up with children from other schools. Then, off they all went in their groups to try a range of activities from making it through a spider's web to completing a course blindfolded.
All the children had great fun!
'I really had a good time and I learnt some new games like untangling ourselves. Some I could do and some I couldn't' (Dominic)
'I thought it was brilliant because all the students in Mount Grace were amazing and encouraging. The students made me feel more confident in all of the problem solving. The teachers who helped the students were amazing too. Thank you so much' (Grace)
'It was fun working with people that I did not know and the games were lots of fun. All the teenagers were very, very, very, very kind' (Luke)
'Mount Grace was really fun and all the year tens were really nice. I would like to do that again.' (Lena)
'I think the Mount Grace activities were fun, mainly when we worked as a team and used our ideas whilst making new friends' (Olivia)
'I loved the activities because they were challenging and that meant we had to work together' (Phoebe)
' I loved the activities Mount Grace challenged us to do. My best activity was the water race. It was great!' (Isabelle)
Thank you to all the year ten students who ensured all the children had a brilliant time. It was also nice for the teaches to see some ex-pupils organising the events too.
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As part of our science topic of Sound, Year 4 carried out an experiment to see whether we could ‘tune’ plastic bottles and create a series of consecutive notes. We collected sets of plastic bottles and then discussed how we could begin to create a particular note. After some discussion, we thought that if we filled the bottles with different amounts of water this could provide us with different notes. We also considered using sand or rice to fill the bottles, but decided that water was the best option, because we could add or remove a little at a time.
Splitting into different groups we all managed to create at least 3 separate notes from our bottles. Grace, our resident flute player, showed us how best to create a sound from the bottle, which was to blow across the top of the neck of the bottle rather than blowing directly into it.
The group who had the best result with 5 different notes, used Pellegrino bottles. These were only set where the neck gradually opened into the base of the bottle. The other groups’ bottles had ridges down the side and only a short neck, which we think hampered our tuning efforts.
As you can see we had fun testing our theory and were pleased that we had managed to make the notes C, D, E, F and G. We also noticed that to start with a similar amount of water needed to b e added to the bottle, but after note E, the pattern was not the same and we had to add increasing amounts.
We really enjoyed creating our musical instruments as you can see from the photos below.
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On Friday 7th October, year 4 held their class assembly in front of the school and parents. The children presented work they had been doing so far this term.
The start of term coincided with what would have been Roald Dahl's 100th birthday, so everyone had written a synopsis of their favourite Roald Dahl book, drawn their favourite character and written about why they liked that particular character. Six children presented their work and the stories of The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine and Fantastic Mr Fox were featured.
In literacy the children are looking at 'Stories from Other Cultures' and have written setting and character descriptions based on what they have read and seen. They have been trying to improve their vocabulary and start their sentences in different ways and this has led to some fabulous writing being produced. Some of this is shown in the slide show below.
Their topic of Footsteps Around the World will take them to Africa, Australasia and Europe, where they will be finding out about the geography and some of the history of countries within those continents.The children have created a fact file of an African country and some of these were presented to the audience. They have also drawn pictures of animals or a landmark from one of the continents and these are currently decorating the corridor outside the Year 3 and 4 classrooms. In the assembly the children held a sound quiz, where the animal noises of a kiwi, cobra, elephant and kangaroo were played. The audience had no trouble in distinguishing the first three, but the kangaroo was a bit more difficult!
In our Sound topic in science the children have learned how sound is made, and how to change the pitch and volume of a sound.These were demonstrated in the assembly using a glokenspiel. They have also made their own guitars, thinking about how the pitch of the notes changed when they used different sized elastic bands, but also when they had a bigger box. We were also lucky to have Mr Hornett, a year 3 parent, come and talk to us about his job as a sound engineer, which the children thoroughly enjoyed.
Although we have only been back in school for 5 weeks, we have learned an awful lot already as our assembly showed. The finale was a song all about reading as without this skill we would not have been able to produce the work that we have.
WELL DONE YEAR 4 A FANTASTIC ASSEMBLY!
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