School Blog

We have arrived at Wildchild and have had an incredibly busy first day. We have been making bug hotels and playing lots of team building games. Some of us have been on the toboggans and the others have been toasting marshmallows on the campfire. We are ready to go and enjoy a nice hot chocolate around the campfire!

Today we used a combination of science and design technology skills to build shelters to fit specific criteria: to protect the occupants from rain and to be strong enough should a tree fall on it. We considered different materials to use and collected natural resources from our outside environment. We learnt how triangles are the strongest shape and saw how they are used in all sorts of buildings. Once we had built our shelters, we tested them! The rains came, the trees fell and we saw just how strong and protective our shelters were.

Today we ended our Rainforests topic with a march around the school to raise awareness of deforestation. We made banners and placards with striking images and slogans, and prepared short speeches using key facts about the effects of deforestation on the animal and plant life that live there. We had so much fun and it was great to see other classes stopping their learning to listen to what we had to say. Even Mr Staples popped his head out of his office window to watch our march!

Today 7 of us got to go to our first High 5 Netball tournament! We played lots of 5 minute matches against other schools and it was really fun to play all of the different positions. We won lots of the matches, whilst showing excellent sportsmanship and fantastic team work and Miss Newman was very impressed with how our Netball skills have developed.

This week, we have been learning all about angles. We have looked at the different types and how we can identify each one. 

Today, Miss Mead let us loose with the masking tape. In pairs, we stuck the tape to the table and created different angles. Then, we swapped tables with a different pair and spent time identifying the angles. Some of us used our right angle checker to check what kind of angle we were looking at to make sure we labelled it correctly. 

Our topic for this term is Rainforests! Today we had some very special visitors come in to show us lots of Rainforest animals. We saw a Gecko named Custard, an African bullfrog, 2 Madagascar hissing Cockroaches, a Millipede, a Jungle nymph stick insect and even a Boa constrictor snake! We were able to get up close and handle the animals if we wanted to, the millipede tickled our hands which made lots of us giggle. In the afternoon we made fact files of our favourite animal from the day and had a go at drawing the animals to see if we could capture all of the wonderful patterns they had.

Lime class have really enjoyed our Wow Week this week, all about our topic involving Robots.

On Monday, we used our D&T skills to make our own robots, we tried to run an electrical circuit through them to have an element of our robot light up and also used our knowledge of linkages and levers to try and make our robot move! 

On Tuesday we were very busy looking at the different types of angles in robots and solving maths factory problems involving area and perimeter.

On Wednesday, we used our art skills to create our own perspective drawings similar to the style of Eric Joyner, with our own robots and donuts!

On Thursday, we wrote up our instruction manuals for our own robots thinking about different things the user would need to know about how they work.

On Friday, we did some more reading of our core text 'The Iron Man' by Ted hughes, and came up with some of our own robotic dances in PE, which we shared with the rest of the Year 4 classes!

We had a brilliant Science Day last week in Lime class! Lots of us dressed up like scientists and we explored lots of the different types of scientists people can be. Some of us even brought in some science experiments to show to the class, which we really enjoyed taking a closer look at! We finished our day making posters for the Science Day competition all about connections. 

Lime Class had a fantastic passion week learning all about the teacher’s passions! 

On Monday we learnt about Mrs Gray's passion or art and looked at some famous artists. We created pieces in the style of Picasso, Banksy and Bridget Riley. 

On Tuesday we learnt about Miss Newman's love of musicals and turnt our classroom into a theatre to watch 'Shrek! The musical'. We were treated to popcorn to get the full experience and lots of us rated this musical 5 stars in our performance reviews. We then took on some drama activities for ourselves and decided to either act out a scene from a play or sing one of our favourite songs from a musical. We also got to go to the school field to visit Miss Ferguson's horse named Archie and we even got to stroke him! 

On Wednesday we spent the morning learning about Miss Newman's passion for travelling. We discussed lots of different holiday destinations and created posters to persuade Miss Newman where she should travel to next. 

On Thursday we got creative and all worked together to produce a quirky piece of artwork. We all got given a piece of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘The bedroom’ and could choose which media we wanted to use to recreate these on our blank pieces of paper. 

On Friday we spent the day teaching each other about eachothers passions and taking part in some child led activities. We got in to the hall to learn all about golfing techniques, different styles of dance, the game of cricket and football skills. Once back in the classroom, some children showed us tutorials on how to draw faces, how to draw in the style of Quentin Blake and how to draw football T-shirts. 

We had a fantastic week learning about and embracing everyone’s passions!