As we near the end of our first term, it's been another busy week in Year 4. We are working really hard and doing some super learning. We have also enjoyed lots of outdoor time this week, in the cold and snow!

4JD

We were feeling inspired by nature in the woods despite the rain, wind and mud. We put our boots and coats on and went in search of interesting leaf shapes, mushrooms and any creatures braving the winter weather.

We created our own natural pendants. We counted the rings to see how old our piece of wood was. Threading through the string was quite a challenge, but colouring in the natural wood was very satisying. Some of us even gave our pendants a border and created a double sided nature inspired pendant.

Y4SS

We’ve had great fun in Y4SS this week because the week started with snow!! We were all VERY excited when we arrived at school to find that the playground was covered in a thick layer of snow which was completely untouched. As a result, we decided to be the first class out there to make the most of the white stuff. We marched in our coats, gloves, snow boots and wellies down to the bottom playground to play in the snow. Some of us made snow angels, snow waffles, snow sentences and snow sculptures! At the end of our time outside, Mrs Smith let us all throw a snow ball at her… it was great fun! What a perfect way to start our week.

Later in the week, we finished our book study story – Tiger, Tiger – which we’ve been reading this term. It’s set in ancient Rome so it links perfectly with our current topic. We were thrilled to find out what happened in the end and there was a bit of a twist in the story that kept us guessing right up until the last paragraph! We’ve really enjoyed the story and it has helped us to learn more about life in the Roman times. We’ve written our own book reviews to show other people what we thought about the book and have all thought carefully about our recommendations of it. Some of us are really keen to read it again at home and share the story with our families. Check out our book reviews for a brief synopsis and to find out more…

4CW

This week in our outdoor PE session we have been focusing on orienteering skills.  We had to transport a tennis ball from one end of the playground to the other without moving when we had the ball. We had a tennis racket each and one ball between us. This meant we had to work as a team to get the ball to the other side.  We then used equipment to make the simple maps shown below.  It was surprisingly difficult to get it exactly right.

4JP

We started our work on measurement this week. First of all, we measured objects around the classroom in cm and m. It was great fun but also quite tricky to get accurate measurements. We had to help each other to use the tape measure. We measured ourselves too and compared and ordered our heights.

Then we decided to measure our feet! We needed to use cm and mm for this. Using a ruler is quite tricky - we were so much better at it by the end of the lesson. We measured both our feet and compared them to our friends' feet.

You may know that we have been working on our writing, inspired by a book called 'Escape from Pompeii'. We wrote some very descriptive pieces which described the scene in Pompeii before and after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. We have been fascinated by this bit of Roman history and it has also sparked our interest in volcanoes.

This week, we have been learning about an artist called Andy Warhol. In 1985, he made a series of paintings and prints of Mount Vesuvius. He was part of the Pop Art movement so these pictures are full of bold lines and bright colours. We explored some ideas and wrote some notes in our new sketchbooks.

When we had finalised our ideas, we had a go at making our own pop art pictures of this famous volcano. Here they are with our sketchbooks.

What a stunning display they make!

Christmas arrived in 4JP this week too. We have festive books, advent calendars, a Santa jigsaw and today we put up our Christmas tree. Doesn't it look pretty?