Year 4
Welcome to Year 4
Welcome back Cowell Class! I hope you have had a lovely Easter break are ready for a busy and exciting summer term. We are looking forward to all the brilliant things we will be doing this term. We hope you continue to shine brightly!
This term our topic is 'Voyage of Discovery'. We will be exploring lots of exciting things throughout the term!
Year 4 will have swimming for PE in the Summer term.
We go every Tuesday with Mrs Ryder and Mrs Thompson. Please ensure you have a full kit each week, this needs to include a swimming cap, swimming costume (no bikinis) and towel. Goggles are welcome but not essential.
Homework will be sent home every Friday and should be returned by the following Wednesday. Reading books must be returned every day as we will need them in class.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Miss Scott and Mrs Killian
Newsletters
DT - Investigating and Evaluating Sandwiches
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. 👩🍳🥪🥙🍞
World Book Day
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 🌟📚
Coding with Turtle Academy





Unplugged Coding Day



Prayer Space Activities with Durham Emmanuel Church
Team Building at New College Durham



Cooking with Chartwells





Cyber Safety with BigFoot


Our Half-Term Stars 🌟
Creating our own digestive system
Sikh Visitor
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.
#HelloYellowDay
We wore yellow to raise awareness for mental health. You all definitely brightened our day! 🌟
Tri-Golf Festival at Maiden Castle






Sign Language 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.
UK Democracy Day
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!
Exploring Mayan civilisation through sources of evidence
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.
Investigating the role of saliva and tastebuds
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!
Creating our Class display - Welcome to Cowell Class




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! 🐉📚