Nine children from year 3 and 4 took part in a festival of badminton at King Alfred's. It was a fantastic afternoon and the children all really enjoyed the opportunity to learn and practise some new skills. 

This week in maths we have started our unit on addition and subtraction beginning with adding and subtracting 1, 10, 100, 1000 from 4 digit numbers. We have been enjoying playing place value millionaire! We have also started a new initiative to support the children with progressing with their times tables in preparation for the new government testing in June. ‘Times
Table Tuesdays’ give the children an opportunity to test their knowledge of their times tables in curriculum steps. Each week the children try to match or better their score from the previous week. If they achieve 18/20 or more they can take another step up our class ladder. We are delighted with the children’s enthusiasm and look forward to celebrating their weekly achievements with a boogie to M People’s ‘Moving on up’ . To help support your child with their times tables please encourage them to practise verbally and through the MyMaths homework. Timestables.co.uk is a really useful website and includes a multiplication tables check which can help children to know which tables they need to work on.  

In English we have been continuing writing our newspaper report on Charlie and Grandpa Joe's visit to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. We have been focusing on relative clauses and use of inverted commas and other punctuation for direct speech.

Our spelling list to learn for this week are some challenge words from the year 3/4 spelling list:

1. calendar
2. appear
3. believe
4. grammar
5. increase
6. interest
7. opposite
8. straight
9. strength
10. women

In our topic work we have been finding out about Anglo-Saxon villages and in science we have been finding out about how changing environments can have a negative impact on the plants and animals that live there.  

Another busy week in Year 4. In Maths we have been continuing to work with 4 digit numbers - comparing them, ordering them in ascending and descending order, rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. 

In English we have been continuing our writing on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory working on developing noun phrases, adjectives and short sentences for impact. The children are rightly proud of their work and we were able to share some of it with the rest of the school during our Celebration Collective Worship on Friday. 

On Thursday we led our key stage collective worship for years 4, 5 and 6. We talked about thankfulness and harvest. In addition for saying thank you for the food we have to eat we thought about how telling our friends that we are grateful for them can help us to all to grow. 

In Science we have been creating classification keys for living things.  As part of our PSHE we have all created and signed up to our Class Standards. Try asking your child if they can remember what they include.  

Some of the children have reported difficulty in accessing the correct spelling list in Spelling Shed. We will look into this but in the meantime they have a paper copy and the spellings are listed below:

1. submarine
2. subject
3. subway
4. submerge
5. subtropical
6. subdivide
7. subheading
8. substandard
9. subtitle
10. submit

Year 4 dodged the downpours on Friday afternoon to search for minibeasts on the back field to help us classify and identify invertebrates as part of our work on Living things and their habitats in Science. We used classification keys to help us identify the invertebrates using their characteristics. We then chose one of the minibeasts to draw and describe in greater detail. We learnt that woodlice are crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. 

We have been using some active maths to help us practise partitioning 4-digit numbers.

.We had fun boosting our fitness with an extra workout on National Fitness Day.

We've had a busy but fantastic start to the new school year. To immerse ourselves into the world of Charlie and the Chocolate factory we sampled some different sweets to tantalise our tastebuds and get us thinking of some tasty descriptions for our writing. 

In maths we began by looking at Roman Numerals and this week we have moved onto rounding numbers to 10 and 100. 

In Science we thought carefully about how we might choose to classify living things. We also began our Topic work on the Anglo-Saxons and Scots examining artefacts to find out more about their lives, exploring timelines and in Art, starting work on researching and designing our own Anglo-Saxon brooches.

On Friday we went into year 1 to share some books with the younger children as part of National Read a Book Day. 

We are delighted with how well the children have settled into year 4 and hope that they continue to work as hard as they have been! 

On Tuesday year 4 ventured out int he rain to the Earth Trust, to learn about the Anglo-Saxons. I was really impressed with how much the children knew about how the Anglo-Saxons would have lived.

When we arrived, we walked up onto Wittenham CLumps and explored the old Iron Age fortifications, which wuold have also been a Roman fort, and then an Anglo-Saxon fort. The children enjoyed pretending to storm the battlements! After that, we talked about shelter and had a go at building our own wooden shelters in the woods. We only had 40 minutes to build them in teams, but they were surprisingly waterproof!

After lunch we all had a go at lighting a fire using a flint and steel, in a similar way to the Anglo-Saxons. We talked about how important fire would have been to people in those times for warmth, cooking and light. The children made bread and it was cooked on the open fire. We served it with honey, but the children found out that this would have been a very rare treat for the Anglo-Saxons, as bees weren't domesticated in those times. Anglo-Saxons ate the equivalent of 3 teaspoons of sugar per year.

I was really impressed with how well behaved the children were on our trip. There was no moaning despite the very wet weather, and the children were polite to the staff and to other people we met, such as dog walkers. 

Thank you so much to the staff and parents who accompanied us on the trip.
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