Welcome to Year 4

Welcome back to school! We hope you have all had a lovely Summer break with your family and friends and are ready for a busy and exciting year in Year 4.   We have Mrs White, Mrs Killian, Mrs Abbott and Mrs Roddam supporting us throughout the week.  We are looking forward to all the brilliant things we will be doing this term. We hope you continue to shine brightly!

Our topic this term is a Tale to Tell...

This Autumn Term, we will be exploring the Ancient Egyptians we will be investigating who the Egyptians were and what impact they made on society. In Geography, we will be learning what the water cycle is as well as features of rivers. In Art, we will be exploring the work of Freida Kahlo and developing our drawing skills. In DT, we will be creating our own pneumatic toy! In music, we will be working alongside Mr Bruinewood who will be helping us to play various musical instruments as well as develop our musical knowledge and vocabulary. 

Our PE lessons will be on a Thursday.

Please make sure you come into school wearing your PE kit (red T shirt, black or blue shorts, trainers or plimsoles and tracksuit bottoms and hoodie - when it is cold.) For safety, you need a pair of appropriate PE shoes to take part in outdoor PE lessons. Long hair is to be tied back and earrings removed. 

We will regularly post information on dojo but if you have any questions do let us know. 

Mrs Bravington, Mrs White, Mrs Killian, Mrs Abbott and Mrs Roddam

We created peace bracelets where we learnt about various different faiths. Each bead on our bracelets represents a different faith. 🕊

We had an exciting morning with Caitlin from the SSP. We thoroughly enjoyed playing End Zone! ⛹️‍♀️⛹️‍♂️

Our first lesson was to investigate what the three states of matter are and understand the difference between solids, liquids and gases. We did this by filling cups with marbles and seeing how the ‘particles’ behaved when we shook the cup. We discussed if the bonds between the particles were strong or weak as well as how the particles moved. 👩‍🔬

We had a very busy week spreading awareness for anti-bullying!

We wore our odd socks to celebrate individuality. We even created our very own odd sock and wrote down words and drew pictures about what things make us who we are. We took part in a live webinar with Jo and Jack from Picture News. They helped us understand what British Values and Protected Characteristics are and why they are important. We discussed what discrimination is and why the Equality Act matters as well as how we can make an impact in our school and the wider world.
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We also travelled to Greece, Italy and Mexico trying lots of different foods. We tried mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, basil, guacamole. Our favourite was definitely the nachos and guacamole! 😋

We had a fantastic morning at Durham City Gymnastics Club 🤸‍♀️

We have been concentrating on supporting our mental health by learning different mental health superpowers that can help us to cope with our emotions and feelings. 

What an exciting afternoon we had! Meet our new school councillors for Year 4! Well done everyone! We are so proud of you all. 🌟

We had an exciting science lesson this afternoon! We investigated the role of our saliva glands and tastebuds by trying different flavours of sweets. We also investigated how our other senses help to send messages to our brain when eating by pinching our noses and covering our eyes. A great start to our digestive system unit! 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

Year 4 September 2022 - July 2023

For our DT unit this summer term, we were given the task to create Viking longhouses. First, we’re searched what a Viking longhouse is investigating the features that they have and thinking about what features we could use to create ours. We then designed our very own houses thinking about the materials and tools we would use. We then created our longhouses using our designs. With the help from Mrs Bravington and Mrs Killian, we used the saws to construct the base out of wood. We then measured and cut cardboard and decorated it with straw to give our roofs a thatched effect! 

We had lots of fun during DT on Wednesday afternoon! As part of our DT unit, we will be looking at making our own healthy sandwiches this term. On Wednesday, we created and tried a variety of different sandwich fillings including: cheese savoury, tuna mayo, club sandwich and cream cheese. We then evaluated the sandwiches by rating their taste, smell, texture and appearance. 👩‍🍳🥪🥙🍞

We have had a brilliant day celebrating World Book Day! We enjoyed a fabulous parade this morning where we got to show the whole school our amazing costumes. We then took 10 minutes out of our school day to read for pleasure. Mrs Harvey challenged us to see if we could be captured reading in some funky and bizarre places. After, we then enjoyed an emoji quiz where we had to guess the name of the book title by looking at the emojis for clues. 

You all looked fantastic Class 4 🌟📚

This half-term we have been learning about the festival of Vaisakhi. We had the opportunity to meet Mr Singh. We got to ask him lots of questions about the festival as well as what the 5 K’s represent. We then listened to some traditional instruments as well as practised meditation.  

We wore yellow to raise awareness for mental health. You all definitely brightened our day! 🌟

For sign language day, we discussed what it means to be deaf and how we can communicate with deaf people effectively. We then learnt different signs for animals and played animal bingo as a class. 

We discussed what democracy is, the structure of parliament and why we vote. We then talked about how we vote for school council and why it is important to have a school council in school. After, we discussed what qualities would make a good school councillor. We then worked as tables and wrote key words in our people that would best describe what type of person we would want to represent our class.

Some of us are going to write our manifestos throughout next week. We will then nominate 4 candidates who we will then vote for as a class and decide who will represent Cowell Class at School Council meetings.

Good Luck Everyone!

We discussed the difference between primary and secondary sources and how they help us find out information about a historical period. We also talked about how reliable different sources of evidence can be too!

We then looked at artwork created by Frederick Catherwood who assisted John Lloyd Stephens whilst he explored lost Mayan cities. We analysed artwork created by Frederick Catherwood and used our inference skills to determine what the artefacts drawing/painted in his artwork could be made from and what the artefacts might have been used for. This then gave us an idea about what society might have been like during the Mayan period.

We investigated how our tastebuds and saliva work by trying to guess the flavour of different sweets. We first had to guess the flavour when our eyes were closed and our noses were pinched. Then, we guessed again but just with our eyes closed. Finally, we had to guess the flavour of the sweet using all of our senses.

We also learnt about where saliva comes from and how our tastebuds keep us safe.

FUN FACT: Did you know that we have over 10,000 tastebuds which change every two weeks and we produce 1 litre of saliva every day!

Year 4’s Class author this year is Cressida Cowell. She is well known for writing the fantastic ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ series. As a class, we created our own dragons. Everyone’s ideas were incredibly imaginative! 🐉📚