Skara Brae has been the focus of our learning in Key Stage 2 this week. We’ve found out about where and what it is (a Neolithic Stone Age settlement in Orkney) and when it was built (about 5000 years ago). The children have had to ask questions and consider evidence to come up with the answers to these. Now to design our own Neolithic Stone Age homes! To do this we gathered ideas, looking at Stone Age shelters and how they had evolved, and decided upon the best way to recreate these in our own model. We will use ModRoc as our basis to create the shape, then must use our findings about Skara Brae to make our model as authentic as possible. We can’t wait to start making them! Come back soon to see photographs of our very own Stone Age village!

As a final treat at the end of Book Week we were fortunate enough to have a real life author, illustrator and publisher visit our school for the day. Nicholas Halliday, a children’s author, spent an hour with each class, sharing his books and inspiring the children to write. From reception to Year 4 every child and staff member thoroughly enjoyed the day. The feedback from Nicholas about our school was wonderful, he even took to Twitter and expressed his delight at being at our school. Well done everyone!

We’ve bought books, swapped books, talked about our favourite books, returned to school for bedtime books, read books, heard books, looked at books and written our own book. Soon to be published! (Spoiler alert!: it’s called ‘The Lost Smile’.)

Today we had the author Nicholas Halliday in school to answer our questions and offer us advice about writing our own stories. He was inspirational!

Our wonderful Book Week has reminded us of how important enjoying books really is.

We’ve been getting to grips with time and the 24 hour clock this week in Eagles’ Class. We’ve solved time problems, found time intervals and converted times from the 24-hour clock to the 12-hour clock. Today we played clock dominoes and some of us were converting times from various countries around the world. We’re feeling a lot more confident about time now, meaning our hard work has paid off!  

What a lovely time!

What a fantastic start to Spring Term!

I couldn’t be more proud of each and every child in Eagles Class; recently their attitude within the classroom and around school has been a perfect example to the rest of the children at Haynes. Well done Year 4.

We are loving our new chocolate-based topic, ‘The Golden Ticket’, and enjoy sharing ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ on a regular basis. It is helping us to create some brilliant creative writing and participate in some great speaking and listening exercises too. The children were particularly brilliant when re-telling the first five chapters of the story and could speak confidently and clearly, adopting the style of Roald Dahl. This is great news! We have had a big focus on talking so it is wonderful to see the children’s use of language and different styles progressing.

Maths has been loads of fun too. We had a great time last week finding rules to sequences and checking if they would work and we have also been carrying out some mathematical enquiries to help us to apply our learning to real-life situations.

We’ve mainly been working with multiplication and division and our times tables are getting much better! Working systematically was really important when solving problems so that we could find all the possible solutions. It was fun working in different groups to enable us to talk through our ideas, using lots of maths vocabulary.

In Science we have been finding out about States of Matter and can all now explain what a solid, liquid or gas is. Observing these closely has enabled us to talk about them in more detail; we particularly enjoyed observing them when creating our ‘Fizzy Lifting Drinks’ during our Stunning Start (we loved tasting them even more!). We have been thinking about how the states of matter can be changed and what the differences are between them. Some of us observed these changes at playtime last week, when looking at ice that had formed overnight. We will be carrying out investigations to delve into this matter further! Very exciting!

There’s been more fun than that, though! We’re currently investigating El Salvador because cocoa beans grow there; it has lots of volcanoes too. We’ve found out more about them and learned some really technical vocabulary! We’ve seen what life is like for children of a similar age to us in El Salvador, and how the geography of the country impacts on the way people live there. We’re starting to think about the Aztecs and Mayans and will discover how they are linked to chocolate too!

In Art we are studying Andy Warhol and have learned about his style, known as Pop Art. We have looked carefully at different packaging and can’t wait to create our own Andy Warhol inspired artwork, followed by our own packaging for chocolate bars in the coming weeks. Here we are observing the packaging. We discussed what we liked and didn’t like about the packets before sketching them, then we chose one to simplify into the Andy Warhol style.

In Computing we have started using Scratch and have learned what an algorithm is and how to create one (ask us – we can tell you)! We inputted alogrithms into Scratch and created a programme that made a cat dance, talk, make noises and change colour! We are looking forward to seeing what else we can do!

As you can see we have been very busy indeed. Lots of learning and loads of fun! There’s plenty more to come too, including our trip to Cadbury’s World!

Well done again, Year 4, what stars you are! I’m looking forward to the next few weeks.

We had a wonderful time learning lots about the Ancient Egyptians with an interactive theatre experience and two fabulous workshops. In the morning we crept into the inner chamber of a pyramid to help an explorer solve a mystery. Luckily we had the help of a few characters from Ancient Egypt, including Tutankhamun, a stonemason, a noblewoman and Anubis! Their stories and advice helped us to help Daphne the explorer and solve the mystery.

After lunch we heard more stories and myths from the colourful characters of Ancient Egypt, and went on a dig. We found out about Ancient Egyptian names, jobs and dancing.

We all really enjoyed our day.

Today Owl and Eagle classes have been busy doing drama in our English lessons. They have created scenes from The Waterhorse by Dick King Smith which portrayed how the characters were feeling. We filmed the scenes and will be using them tomorrow for freeze framing and as a stimulus for writing. Later this week we will publish photos and examples of writing. Watch this space…….