We are so lucky to have Balbir Singh’s Dance Company in with us for the rest of this term. It has been a great start to the term where Bobak and Tricia have taught us new breakdancing techniques. We will showcase our finished dance at our Year 4-run event on Thursday 7th March 5:30-6:30pm in collaboration with the other Year 4 classes, alongside other professional musicians and artists. Jamie, a professional illustrator, is working with us to illustrate and animate a finished piece that he will showcase on the 7th March too. Check out his live drawing of the dancing from the last two weeks. The creativity in Year 4 this half term is amazing.

We’ve had fun learning about electricity this half term. So far, we have explored electrical safety; what a conductor is and how we can draw, create and troubleshoot making an effective circuit powered by batteries with bulbs, wires and lights. Some teams worked out that two batteries would create a brighter light, whereas two lights and one battery would mean each light is dimmer. Next week, we will continue to build on this and learn about other conductors of electricity. The class loved getting practical and were so happy when they persevered as a team to light their bulb!

Thank you to everybody involved in our Arts Fortnight. We have had an amazing two weeks and we will let the art, dance, poetry and music speak for itself.

Free to be me

We’ve had a fantastic first half of our Arts Fortnight, exploring the book Invisible Things and the different emotions and feelings we might experience. We started by creating a journal to house our thoughts. We’ve also started learning our dance to the song ‘Hounds of Love’ by Kate Bush.

Mrs Johnston guided us through the skill and techniques involved in self-portraits and we had a go – the children focused so much whilst doing this and we will watercolour these next week! We will then begin to transform these into more cartoon-like portraits, like the illustrations in Invisible Things. We’ve also picked our favourite Invisible Thing from the book and started playing around with clay to create a 3d version of this. I personally can’t wait to see the journey and final product of these tomorrow!

Take a look at one of our iMovie film trailers that we made earlier in the week. This was to help us wrap up all of our learning from this half term. The trailer maps the Roman invasion of Britain in a Horrible Histories style! The children loved filming the footage and using their amazing Roman shield, which they made last half term, as a prop during the battle scene!

Check out an example of one of our stop motion animations of the Roman invasion in Britain. We learnt about how many attempts it took them to conquer certain parts of Britain, weaving in Geography elements and understanding the timeline of events of when this took place.

Wow! What a fantastic afternoon we’ve had trialling out a new strategy of learning called Relay challenge. The children were so enthusiastic, active and engaged. As you can see on their faces, they loved consolidating times tables knowledge through varied reasoning questions. The working out on each sheet shows how they are using bar models, part whole models, column addition and other methods to help them succeed.

Today a few children went with Mrs Tatam-Hall to the pet shop to buy some new guinea pigs!

We went in the minibus which was very exciting!

There were lots of things to see in the shop – fish, birds, reptiles and all manner of small furry animals!

We have been lucky enough to have the non-fiction author Andy Seed visiting us this afternoon. He has inspired us with his knowledge of animal facts and it has been interesting to understand how he presented his animal factual books in a question and answer interview format! We can’t wait to read some of his books and use this style of writing in our own writing! We even brought our magpie books into the hall to steal great ideas and facts! 💡

4H worked really hard on this Art unit. It wasn’t always easy and lots of perseverance and resilience was deployed! What they have produced is a testament to this resilience and developing their ability to reflect and ‘go again’ to create a fantastic finished tapestry!

This large, gestural drawing is a certain style of drawing that requires:

• Using your whole arm
• Not adding too much detail
• Looking for shapes
• Long, sweeping pen strokes
• Feeling the movement!