Year 4 have been working really hard on their Healthy Me topic and learning all about nutrition and now to have a healthy diet. In English we have read 'Goldilocks eat your greens' and decided to write our own stories following the same theme. We worked really hard to design our own characters for our stories and made sure they also learned a lesson about being healthy. We then published our books and made illustrations to go along with our stories. Lime class decided share their books with the reception children. We were able to inspire them and we got lots of lovely compliments about our original stories. 

This week we ended our Healthy Me topic with a Cultural Food Day. During our topic we discovered that we all enjoyed some very different foods, some of which others of us had never heard of, or had the chance to try. We invited our adults to come into school and bring a traditional dish for us to learn about and taste. All of the children in year 4 had the chance to learn about and taste foods from Germany, Romania, Bangladesh, Nigeria, U.K., Sri Lanka and food that is eaten during the Jewish festival of Passover. Thank you so much to all the adults who joined us for this event. Our tastebuds were buzzing with the variety of foods to explore and we can't stop talking about it! 

We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to take some Year 4 children to a Lacrosse Festival today! There were 4 stations in total with each one being run by a member of Hitchin Lacrosse club. We were able to develop our skills and knowledge of the sport and finished off with a friendly game at the end. Out of all the schools, Fairlands won the festival by showing excellent teamwork:

-treating everyone equally, supporting each other and working together to have fun and achieve 

-celebrating each otters successes

-being a good friend and a positive team player in school, support and life

This is a great achievement and we were very proud of all the children who took part for representing Fairlands school so well. We were awarded with a certificate from Stevenage sporting futures and a teamwork teddy bear. 

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!