Squirrels Class

Our Year 3 and 4 class is called Squirrels

2021-2022

Spring Term

Welcome back everyone.

Our Key Line of Enquiry is Is our world unique?

Reading

We have introduced an extra Reading for Pleasure time – half an hour on Friday mornings where we can choose what we read, who we read with, where we read and how we read. Some of us love sharing books and others like to read quietly. We can bring books from home or choose to read books we have a school. We can read magazines, manuals, comics or books. We are all enjoying this time because we are all enthusiastic readers!

: Sharing fiction books.

: Quietly engrossed.

: Enjoying a new library book.

: Choosing to share an interesting page with Mrs Hillier.

Science

We made edible layers of soil to learn which order the layers are in!

In science we are looking at rocks and soils. We discovered that some rocks erode easily and some rocks are permeable by doing experiments. We have been using Venn diagrams and Carroll diagrams to sort them.

: Sorting

Autumn Term

Welcome to Squirrels Class.

Our Key Line of Enquiry is What does a hero look like?

Christmas jumper day

We all wore our Christmas jumpers to raise money for Save the Children and took part in a Christmas dash around the playing field.

Christmas cooking

We made Christmas biscuits. We had to work in groups to read the recipe, weigh out the ingredients and follow the instructions to make the biscuits. Mrs Hillier helped by putting them in and taking them out of the oven!

Christmas Stockings

We looked at different stockings to think about why we liked them. After practising different sewing stitches, learning how to add buttons and ribbons, we designed our own stockings. One of the hardest jobs was threading our needles but we all managed. We then cut out our patterns, added our embellishments and sewed the two parts of the stocking together.

Christmas plates

We designed our own Christmas plates – they are all amazing!

Calendars

We made our own tree printing block to make our calendars.

: Cutting out a tree shape.

: Painting our trees.

: Some of our printing blocks.

: After printing 4 trees we decorated showing the different seasons.

Elf day

We have taken part in Elf Day to support research into alzheimers.

Light of the World.

The Bridge came in to help us understand how Jesus is the Light of the World. We watched the Darkness to Light clip from Salisbury Cathedral and talked about how we felt about darkness and light. We suggested that you need light to guide you, it also gives you warmth and you can get energy from the sun to power your lights at home.

We discovered that light has no shadow!

We found out that the four Gospels (good news) were written in different ways. Matthew wrote for the Jews, Mark for the Romans, Luke wrote in great detail and John wrote about what Jesus said and did. We looked at Jesus’ life timeline to discover that his life started before he was born and continues now into eternity.

We made collars to put round tea lights to remind us of all we have learnt – Jesus is the Light of the World.

Our two stars of the day linked light and Jesus’ life timeline to the Lords Prayer! “The Power and the Glory” being energy and “for ever and ever” being eternity.

Dragon dens.

To help with our instruction writing we made some dragon dens at home. Aren’t they fantastic!

Children in Need

We all got our Strictly sparkle on for Children in Need.

: We borrowed the Strictly glitter ball!

: Keep dancing!

Anti-bullying week: One kind word.

We are all wearing odd socks to school this week for anti-bullying week. We have also made brown colour wheels to show that all browns are not the same but they are all brown! We have also designed our own hero, decided what their super powers are and what they stand up for. We have talked about how one kind word can start a chain reaction.

Remembrance Day

We wrote on poppy leaves who we were thinking about on remembrance day.

Diwali

We learnt about Diwali on 4th November and made some diva lamps.

Young Writers

Three of our Year 4 children received certificates from the Rotary Club for their entries into the Young Writer competition last year. Congratulations to them!

Teaching Live

We have been taking part in Teaching Live this term with Pie Corbett. We have been writing poems and uploading them onto teachinglive.net. You can see our work by visiting teachinglive.net, scrolling down and clicking on the Newton Tony school tag. An example of one of our poems is below:

Feathers

What are light? A feather from a beautiful blue bird, a sharpened pencil on the ground and paper flying in the air.

What are heavy? Doors opening and shutting, a mattress lying on a bed and some burning metal on concrete .

What are hard? A long piece of wood, a large wooden chair and a toasty radiator in the cold kitchen.

What are soft? A comfy blanket lining on a worm cosy smooll bed, comfy worm clothes in a draw and a dog’s warm fur.

Harvest

We made a Harvest Sheaf loaf for our service in the church.

We also wrote prayers for our Harvest service.

Dear God,

Thank for our world.

Thank you for the fields, trees and rivers, that are part of our world that allow us to grow our fruit and vegetables. Thank you for trees that give us apples and pears, for bushes that provide blackberries and raspberries and for fields that provide wheat.

Thank for the sunshine and the rain to grow the crops.

Thank you for our wonderful world,

Amen

Dear God,

Thank you for our farmers who look after animals and grow our crops.

Thank you for people, machines and animals who harvest our crops.

Thank you for people who look after the machinery.

Thank you for fishermen who catch our sea food.

Thank you for sailors who deliver the food to all different parts of our world.

Amen

Science

This term we were thinking about forces and magnets. We thought about pushes and pulls, how forces work on different surfaces and the force needed to pull different weights. We discovered which materials were magnetic and which were not before exploring how magnets behaved towards each other to understand that magnets have two poles. Finally, in groups we invented our own educational magnetic game.

: How much force is needed?

: Trying different surfaces.

: Pushes and pulls

: Will two magnets stick together?

: Why does the magnet move to always face the same way?

: What happens if we do this?

: Are all types of coins magnetic?

: Game number 1.

: Game number 2.

: Game number 3.

Dragons!

The Year 4s found a dragon-fruit outside our classroom. We are reading a book about a boy who hatched a dragon from a dragon-fruit so we put it on our windowsill. One morning the children came in to discover it had hatched and a tiny dragon was sitting high up on our window.