What an exciting time we have had at Wildchild! We have done amazingly well in all activities. From abseiling, archery, mini beast hunting and shelter building, we have made sure we all tried our very best. We certainly built on our team building, independence and resilience while being away and the teachers are all very proud of us. Well done Year 4 for demonstating super behaviour and showing everyone at Wildchild how wonderful we all are at Fairlands.

Those of us at school today spent most of the day outside. We practised teamwork skills and enjoyed a day of outdoor adventure. During the morning we learnt about map skills and orienteering before heading out around the upper site, armed with a map, to find markers at set locations. We used the skills of map orientation and thumbing to work out where we were and where we had to get to.  During the afternoon we created obstacle courses to challenge agility, coordination and balance, and we worked together to create scavenger hunts for another group to complete.

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.