St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Thame

Year 4

September 2020

Ancient Egypt - Topic Web Term 2

Year 3 and 4 Spelling List

Year 4 Recommended Reads

LKS2 Reading Bookmarks

Times Tables Guidance for parents

Year 4 Multiplication Times Table Online Practice

https://www.timestables.co.uk/multiplication-tables-check/

The children can complete the test either on a laptop or an IPAD - have a go and enjoy the challenge!

BBC Super Movers - Help to learn your times tables through singing and dance

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/supermovers/times-table-collection/z4vv6v4

17/12/2020

Merry Christmas - Enjoy a fun filled festive time!

11/12/2020

Our Roving Reporters enjoyed taking part in the special Cafod Virtual Advent Assembly on Thursday. This taught us to not take things for granted. We also took on a challenge from Ms Gowers – we thought about how we can let our light shine this Advent. Our thoughts are being displayed around school this week and will be coming home at the end of next week. We thought about the differences we can make to our family and friends, our class, our school community, our local community and then the world in which we live. The Team were extremely proud of the children's thoughts - very inspiring!

We have loved learning about ‘Excitable Edgar’ because we have been focusing on emotions and expressions. These activities have helped to ‘uplevel’ our vocabulary. Using a film in English was a great idea – most of us are visual learners and this has truly helped us to ‘see’ the story. We can’t wait to write our diary entries next week....

We have really enjoyed decorating our classroom this week. This has been time for our bodies to relax and we have enjoyed decorating with our friends. We are feeling the Festive Fun in Year 4!

04/12/2020

Today we built and evaluated the Shadufs we had designed. We were able to problem solve, working together to come up with solutions to enable us to create working Shadufs. We all learned something about the design process, whether we completed our design or not. We hope you enjoy the pictures.

30/11/2020

Obelisks, time and shadows were the talk of the class this morning! Did you know that in Ancient Egyptian times obelisks were used as sundials? Today obelisks can be found all over the world. We made our own sundials in class ready to experiment with' time telling' the next time the sun shines through the clouds! We are looking forward to telling our parents how they work.

Later in the day we took a cruise along the river Nile, from Aswan to Alexandria. It was a memorable trip - with lots of amazing sites to see along the way. Needless to say it was exhausting!

In the afternoon we learnt about the engineering design cycle before designing our own Shadufs. Take a look at some of our designs - we will be creating them, testing and evaluating them next week, so watch this space!

25/11/2020

We continued our travels along the Nile - reaching the Nile Delta and the great city of Alexandria. We enjoyed our virtual tour - it was HOT, HOT, HOT! We wrote all about it in our postcards home.

Our journey continued to the House of Commons where we had a debate about the benefits of the Nile. Whilst we never got to vote on the outcome, the debate was positively sizzling! The Speaker of the House struggled to keep order as the Ancient and Modern day Egyptians fought their claim over the benefits of the Nile.

The 'piece de resistance' was completing our papyrus art and canopic jars. We have written a special post lockdown wish in hieroglyphs that will decorate the front.

09/11/2020

What an amazing start to the week! We hit the ground running, learning all about speech marks and how to use them. Our next challenge of the day was to prepare a role-play of a conversation between an ancient Egyptian priest and a modern scientist about why we have night and day - we practised sentences using our Kung Fu punctuation - which was great fun. Take a look at the clip below to learn a bit more about it.

In the afternoon we each made a cartouche out of a clay, writing our names in hieroglyphics. Did you know that in ancient Egypt the more wealthy Egyptians each had a cartouche made to put on their sarcophagus so that they would not get lost on their journey to the underworld?

Test out your knowledge of hieroglyphics...can you guess whose cartouche is whose?

19/10/2020

Today we travelled to Egypt to explore some of the famous sites. During our whistle stop tour we had time to write a letter home - we hope that you enjoy reading them.

We also learnt how to use Kung Fu punctuation - take a look at our photos to see if you can figure out what punctuation we were doing...

12/10/2020

Today we stepped back in time again to begin to explore our science topic of torches, tombs and timekeepers. We learnt about light and sources of light and investigated reflective surfaces. We created a pic collage of our findings, and whilst all that we included was not necessarily accurate, we now know the difference between a light source and something that just reflects light. Did you know that mirrors are brilliant at reflecting light? Did you also know that ancient Egyptians had 'mirrors' made of metal? The mirrors we use today were not invented until 1835!

Working scientifically we solved the mirror challenge set by the guards of Thutmose III. Take a look at some of the photos to see if you can work out how we did it! In the afternoon we took part is STEM challenges - we had to work hard within our teams, working together we all succeeded-building our very own pyramids. Daniel, Zach, Charlie Bo and Jayden built the tallest pyramid - which was an impressive 43cm tall. Other designs were hugely intricate. We hope you enjoy the slide show of some of the things we did today.

05/10/2020

Today we had a taster day on Ancient Egypt. As Egyptologists we started by examining artefacts. We moved on to Ancient Egyptian codebreaking to solve the curse of the mummy using Hieroglyphics. After that we became scientists, examining Ancient Egyptian Poo shipped over from Cairo, having been excavated from a newly found tomb! We had to use all of our senses to work out whose poo belonged to whom - needless to say we succeeded in our mission just in time for lunch!

After lunch came our mummification challenge - we found our bandage substitutes were sub standard - but that did not stop us! Finally, we were rewarded with an Ancient Egyptian taster menu...imagine cheese from 1300 BC, cured hedgehog (aka beef) and delicious honey cake - YUM.

Some quotes from our fun packed day:

"I enjoyed looking at the poo because it helped me understand the difference between rich and poor peoples diet." Saffron

"I loved mummifying Ruby, it was fun." Lucia

" I enjoyed looking at the poo because there were bones in it! " Ollie

" The food was amazing, mainly the cake!" Zach

We hope you enjoy looking through the pictures.

02.10.2020

This week’s ‘Roving Reporters’ have given us feedback on how they found writing in Year 4 this week.

‘I am proud of my writing this week and I have written more than I did in Year 3.’

‘I am an independent writer and I am SO proud of myself!’

‘I am really proud of the presentation of my learning – my handwriting is incredible!’

‘Thank You Mrs Wickens and Miss Oakley – your WAGOLL (What a Good One Looks Like) was inspiring….. I was able to ‘magpie’ ideas from your writing!’ ‘The WAGOLL helped me to stay on track this week – sometimes I am not sure what to write.’

‘I just loved the picture of the door. Having a picture really helped me because I am a visual learner.’

‘I am starting to love writing now!’ ‘I have written more this week than I have ever written before!’

‘I just LOVED the amount of time we were given to write this week’

As a team, we are incredibly proud of our Year 4 Crew. They have all worked extremely hard, showing great focus, concentration and a sheer determination to achieve!

25.09.2020 - Last week we asked the children to tell us about 'Life in Year 4 so far....' Please ask your child about some of the items on our mindmap below. Fingers crossed they can tell you about some of the activities they have enjoyed!

We are an 'Awesome' Crew and we had great fun creating our own 'Awesome' Stones!

22/09/2020

Year 4's Celebrating Humanity are in the middle of creating a Gallery of Greatness and Passing on Wisdom...

We have researched someone from history that inspires us and have drafted and up levelled mini bio's of them to accompany their portraits. We plan to publish our work next week, along with our own mini bio's. In the meantime we hope you enjoy our Picasso inspired self portraits -which will of course be added to our Class Gallery.

11/09/2020 - Welcome back!

The children are all so excited to be back with their friends and we are so pleased to have our Year 4 Crew altogether – ready and raring to go!

Our Year 4 Roving Reporters would like to tell you about life in Year 4 so far….

“I had butterflies in my tummy on the first morning but when I got into the classroom and I saw my friends and Mrs Wickens I felt happy.”

The children have enjoyed a variety of different activities since coming back both inside and outside the classroom.

“I felt a little worried about coming back but learning about how my brain works with Mrs Hanson and Mrs Heaney was great fun and I found it really interesting!”

“It is good to be back in school! The bubble experiment has been my favourite so far - I loved popping everyone’s bubbles outside!”

“I really enjoyed tasting food and guessing what it was. My favourite was pineapple – I got it right.”

“I’ve been so excited to be in Mrs Wickens’ class and it has been really interesting so far. The Maths challenge inside and outside was great fun.”

“Mrs Wickens, Mrs Hanson and the team never let the fun end - it is going to be a brilliant year!”

We are really proud of the start the children have made in Year 4 and we can’t wait to see where next week’s adventures will take us…