We are very excited about the new Sandringham Park but disappointed that not all users have taken care of it. This led us to reflect on our Living & Learning statement I know that rights come with responsibilities and how this links to using the park.
We’re going to send our suggested rules to Wetherby Town Council and see if they would like some hand made posters to encourage users to make the park a happy and healthy place to play!
We’ve really enjoyed talking about some of our favourite animals in science. The children blew me away with their knowledge about amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds and fish.
We enjoyed thinking about how many different ways we could group animals by using different criteria. Other popular choices included: can fly/can’t fly, lives in the water/lives on land/can live in both and pet/not a pet. I can tell we are going to love this topic so if you do any extra learning at home please let me know so we can share this learning in class and reward the children for their efforts!
Help at home – BBC bitesize has lots of great material on the topic of classifying animals. This is a good page to start from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zfsqtcw
In Mastering Number this week we’ve been thinking about doubles. Specifically, we’ve been looking at:
The children have quickly picked up how to check their doubles using their fingers.
Help at home – ask your child to teach you how you can use your fingers to help you work out your doubles facts.
We started our book club with a recommendation from Freddie. Freddie has been enjoying the book he chose from the school library last week and there is now a waiting list for it!
We shared some of the challenges we’ve completed this week in our Reading Records and reminded ourselves of all the different activities we can choose from. After that, we enjoyed some independent reading in various spaces in the classroom.
Help at home – help your child be ready for next week’s Book Wars we will be having at Book Club on Friday next week. See your child’s Reading Record for full details.
We’ve started the year reviewing column addition. What great mathematicians we have in our class!
Today we have been adding two numbers using equipment to support our understanding about what happens when the column sum is greater than 9.
Help at home – play schools! Ask your child to be the teacher and ‘teach you’ column addition. They might want to make paper tens and ones or draw them. Please let me know if they have been a great teacher and I can reward them with a golden ticket!
As we start the second week of Year 4, I wanted to say thank you for a great start to the year! I can tell this is going to be a great year!
I’ve been so impressed with how quickly the children have settled in to their new routines. We can already respectfully and safely hand out books and equipment and collect it back in again, come in to class ready to learn and get straight in to our morning task. We really are fantastic at being cheerleaders for each other; past the initial embarrassment, they now love saying together “Wow **insert name of classmate**, you’re amazing!” when one of their peers pushes themselves to try something they didn’t believe they could do.
A few of us are still working on having our hands empty, silent voices and eyes on the speaker (which helps us all to concentrate on our learning) so we are working on that as our class target. Every time we achieve our class target we earn a shell. Every time we collect 10 shells we earn an enhancement to our end of term treat. Given how well they are doing I can see this is going to be a BIG treat!
Help at home
Ask your child what is going well for them in Year 4 and what they would like to get better at. If there is anything you or your child need help with please let me know either by email, calling me at school or at pick up. The door is always open!
This week we’ve been revisiting our school rules:
We shared some top tips to help us keep our school rules.
Be respectful
Remember 2 wrongs don’t make a right (Max and Arthur)
Always listen to the teacher (Lillie-Jane)
Always listen to your friends (Orianne)
Always respect nature in school (Sophie)
Use fidgets under the table so you don’t distract friends (Orianne and Sophie)
Be ready
When you hear the whistle at playtime you need to freeze. (Monty)
Stop at 2 when it is “3-2-1 stop” (Freddie)
When you hear “3-2-1 stop” you need to listen (Aria)
Be safe
Don’t stand too close to people in the line so you don’t knock them over.
Don’t stand too close to the fence. (Sophie and Orianne)
Help at home
Help at home by discussing our school rules with your child. Ask them when they find it difficult to follow the rules and how they might be able to overcome this.
If you have any questions please let me know.
We’ve been busy in school today getting ready to see you tomorrow. I am so excited to see you; I hope you are excited too!
In case you are feeling a little nervous, I thought you might like a sneaky peek at the classroom that’s waiting to welcome you.
You will find your creative Barnabus Project art work in the cloakroom. Your peg is labelled with your name ready for your coat and book bag.
Your place has a tray labelled with your name. Remember the pencil case you decorated last year? That’s in your tray ready for tomorrow’s learning.
You’ll also find some new areas I think you’ll be rather excited about …
A reading den …
and a regulation space …
We will be doing PE in the afternoon tomorrow so please wear your PE kit. If you forget or see this message too late, don’t worry, you will still be able to get fully involved!
I hope you all get a good night’s sleep tonight; I and all your friends will be so excited to see you tomorrow.
Mrs Poole
In Key Stage 2, instead of asking you to learn a short list of spellings each week, you will be given a longer list (roughly 40 words) that we will focus on in that half-term. Don’t worry, we’re not asking you to learn them all in one week. Instead, we’ll ask you to focus on learning these words over the course of the entire half-term. There’s a few reasons for this:
How you decide to do this is up to you. You might decide to focus on the trickiest words first. Or, you might decide to learn 8 words a week and really focus on these whilst still practising the others, too. For some of you, you might already feel confident with some of the words so might choose to not practise these at all. However you decide to do it is up to you. The important thing is that you’re learning them and learning how you like to learn them best.
Every Friday, we’ll spend time practising or testing (informally) or discussing all things spelling so be ready (one of our 8 Rs for learning) to join in!
If you need some ideas for practical things to do, check out the Super Spelling Strategies Guide on the school website.
This half-term, our spellings are linked to the rules and strategies we’ll be learning in class:
Each Friday, you’ll be tested on 8 of the words from the list below.
| famous | believe | accident | breathe | answer |
| library | passion | notice | were | possess |
| century | address | favourite | appear | here |
| their | weight | complete | ordinary | wear |
| straight | they’re | surprise | busy | increase |
| session | possible | there | hear | where |
| suppose | mission | eighth | extreme | occasion |
| fraction | different | attention | learn | possession |