London Visit – Featuring Warner Brothers Studio
WHAT AN AMAZING EXPERIENCE!
The Year 4 children experienced an unforgettable 2 days away with their friends and teachers in London. All 3 classes travelled down by train to London to soak in the famous sights it has to offer. The children were blown away by the London Eye and the views it offered up; Buckingham Palace, Wembley, Tower Bridge and much more! Laughs and screams were heard when the children entered Shrek’s Adventure and journeyed through Far Far Away to help find Shrek, and to make it home safely. We moved our tour on to Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace to see if the King was in – the children were amazed at how impressive it all looked! Mr Clewes spoilt us to some lovely food at TGI Fridays and a filling breakfast at our hotel that helped us get through the fun-filled days. A huge highlight of our visit was the HARRY POTTER STUDIO TOUR where we started off by walking around with our eyes wide open in astonishment at every turn of the corner in the ‘Making of Harry Potter’ studio where we saw the Forbidden Forest, Gringott’s Bank, The Great Hall and much more. It was magical! The 2 days also helped us bring our texts to life; Gangsta Granny and Harry Potter.
Quite simply, we had the best time ever!!
Geography Visit – Milldale
FROM MEIR TO MILLDALE ALONG THE RIVE DOVE
When we arrived, we had a leisurely wander down in to the lovely village of Milldale. Here, the children have sketched a geographical drawing of a section of the river, measured the depth of the water at different points of the river and also had an enjoyable walk further up the river. We stopped when we got to a 15,000 year-old cave where we had our dinner. The children were able to use geographical language to identify parts of a river system whilst there. We were all very impressed. Well done Year 4!
Geography – Why are rivers important to us?
During this unit, we investigated the main question of “Why are rivers important to us?”. We used maps to find where the major rivers in the World and the children found out how important the Mississippi River, River Nile, Amazon River and the Yangtze River is to the countries they run through. We then brought it more locally and identified how the River Trent and River Severn benefit the people in these locations. We then delved in to the power of rivers and how they change our landscapes. The children grasped on to high level vocabulary such as erosion, deposition and transportation. Ultimately, we wanted to take all of our new knowledge out in to the local area to see how rivers are formed – the River Blithe and the River Dove at Milldale helped us to do that.
Design and Technology
During our fabulous Design and Technology project, we discovered that David Misell invented the first torch. We carried out market research on which type of torch a Year 4 child would prefer to have and then we used this information to design our own torches. As part of our design, we had to incorporate a switch so that we had an input and an output, linking it to our knowledge from our Science lessons. We put our groups designs together to make one final design to work from. Each group worked collaboratively to make our design, solve problems in order to make it work, and finally evaluated our designs, suggesting ways to make it even better. The children worked excellently together and were so passionate about there design they all managed bring all the materials in from home. Excellent work!!
English
The children have been writing persuasive argument letters and newspaper articles over the last 10 weeks. A huge favourite of the children has got to be the persuasive letters they wrote to Mr Clewes to stop him from building a ‘Chokey’ (straight out of our text ‘Matilda’). They got to work to write formal letters to him to try and make sure he knew the dangers of installing a ‘Chokey’ in our school; some children, however, wanted a ‘Chokey’ to be a new addition to the Crescent Academy. Due to there been two sides to the argument, the children held a protest to try and get their individual view points across. Ultimately, Mr Clewes had the final say and he brought the protest to an end and gave his culminating decision – THE CHOKEY WAS NOT TO BE INSTALLED!! The Year 4 children continued to produce pieces of writing about controversial events. Firstly, they wrote a newspaper article linked to their ‘Love of Reading’ text, ‘Gangsta Granny’, where they reported on how two unknown criminals stole the crown jewels from the Tower of London. Then, if it couldn’t get any worse, they had to use their journalistic skills to inform readers of how the schools sports day equipment had been stolen and how this would affect everyone. Writing in Year 4 has really come to life!!!!
PE
During the final 10 weeks of this academic year, the Year 4 children have engaged in a range of PE activities. Most recently, they have learnt how to improve their own personal abilities in athletics; from how to increase the speed at they run, jump and throw. This has ultimately helped them to get ready for the Lower Key Stage 2 sports day. The children competed excellently with such resilience in events like sprinting, bean bag race, hurdles, skipping and tug’o’war. Everyone had such fun and the parents cheered on with great passion. On top of this, they have also been honing their throwing, fielding and batting skills linked to the game of rounders. The whole of Year 4 have loved competing in their teams during these rounders games. The matches very tactical and very competitive!!
SMSC Day – Future Fest
Another highlight of the year has been ANOTHER of our SMSC days where this time the children were immersed in to their future self. The children attended school dressed up as what they would to be when they are older; we had doctors, mechanics, teachers, DJs, nail technicians and YouTubers!! The children loved watching videos from previous students, teachers parents and even siblings of teachers to show the opportunities available to them. JCB also sent two members of their staff to inform the children of different areas of employment that would be open to them once they leave high school. The children were fully engrossed and asked amazing questions that highlighted how interested they were when thinking about the future. Some children even changed their desired career before the end of the day after listening to a range of people.
