Fiji Class Year 4

DECEMBER 2022

We have had a really fun run up to Christmas in Fiji and are really enjoying our sewing. We are making Christmas decorations out of felt and they are looking great. We have finished our maths and English for the year now but our latest piece of writing was a non-chronological report on a made up creature. To begin with, we studied a report on trolls so we could learn all of the key features that we would need to include in ours. We then found out lots of facts on our cretes (we could choose a gamel, shrimpabear or Goat Eater!) Our writing was neatly organised into paragraphs with sub headings and we all wrote lots using really good openers. In maths, we have been looking at new times tables ready for our booklets on them in the new year. We watched some really funny videos called BBC Supermovers for each times table and danced along. We did PSR with Miss Barsdell but our favourite activity was the loop cards.

In our afternoon lessons, we have finally made poo! Miss Barsdell chickened out of that lesson so we got to do it with Miss Hamblin. It was so much fun but really disgusting! We used bananas, tights food colouring and orange juice. We had to identify each part of the digestive system and its function on a diagram of the human body such as the rectum, stomach and intestines. We also made teeth out of play doh and investigated what types of animals have what types of teeth. What teeth do you think a carnivore like a lion would need? Our next topic is the Anglo-Saxons. We have strated already by looking at some very special artefacts and learning all about their punishments. Did you know that if you stole a pig, you would have your hand cut off! Not very fair but we bet it was effective! ON the other hand, if you killed someone, you only had to pay their family 100 shillings. We realised that they thought stealing and witchcraft were more serious than having a fight! Very different to today. After Christmas, we are looking forward to continuing history and eventually moving on to the Vikings.

In computing, we have done lots more coding including making our own scenes, characters and actions. We are experts on 2Code now! Our music lessons have been focused around learning the songs for our performance. We absolutely loved clapping along to Unto Us a Child is Born and were so excited when we got to do it in the recording! We volunteered Miss Barsdell to stand at the front so everyone could copy her! Even though it has been VERY cold, we have enjoyed our multiskills football P.E sessions with Mr White although we are always glad to come back in the warm afterwards.

We can’t wait to be back together at Milford after Christmas.

NOVEMBER 2022

In Fiji, we are still really enjoying all of our learning. In English, we have written about a lovely story about an old man who dreamed of a forest. In the end he worked hard to make his dream come true and change his horrible world into a colourful world full of animals. We are not writing all about a little boy called Toki who goes on a magical ride through the jungle on a giant chameleon. It is based on a short film called Ride of Passage which we loved watching. In maths, we have started looking at the four operations and reminding ourselves how to use column methods. We make sure we lay it out neatly to help keep all of the number sin the right place and use resources like Place Value counters and abacuses to help us of we need it. After finishing our science work on sound, we have moved back to geography where we learnt all about Europe. We found it on a map and identified several important countries including Norway, Greece and Iceland. Linking to our work on biomes, we realised that most of Europe is temperate forest and has four seasons. Some of Europe is Tundra like Russia and Iceland but Europe also has warm Mediterranean countries like Greece and Spain. We are very excited to move onto animals in science where we will look at teeth and make poo!

After looking at body percussion last half term in music, we are now using the glockenspiels which is loud but really fun. We are also enjoying continuing coding in computing. So far, we have had fun with fish, made an airport and popped bubbles all using Purple Mash! En Francais, after finishing learning different animals, we have now begun learning the instruments. We are still acting out the instruments to help us remember their names.

OCTOBER 2022

In Fiji class this half term, we have been really excited about all of our new topics. In Geography, we learnt about the different biomes around the world including the freezing tundra. We were particularly interested to learn about the different animals (fauna) and plants (flora) that can be found in each biome. Did you know the desert and tundra are similar because trees cannot grow in either biome! Our science this half term has been all about sounds. We have learnt lots of new words including vibrations and pitch and we have done several experiments including investigating which materials muffled a loud drum the best. We have really enjoyed our new times tables booklets and whizzed through the 10s before working on the 5s, 2s and 4s. 2 minutes to do 40 questions is not much time but we get better each time we try it. En Francais, we have been learning different animals which has been fun because we act them out before guessing what animal it is in French. We know une vache is cow and un oiseau is bird. We are really looking forward to more story writing after the half term and finding out which book we will be learning about next.