Living and Learning – Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco
This week in Living and Learning across Years 3 and 4, we have been talking about medicines and how they can help us. We have also talked about the risks and what we can do to reduce the risks, including the importance of following the instructions of a doctor and our adult at home.
Help at home by discussing with your child further how we can be safe with chemicals in our home, whether it relates to medicines, cleaning products or toiletries for example. 
3,4B: Our New Class Novel!
Happy New Year everyone and welcome back.
We’ve had a super first week so far in 3,4B and we can’t wait for the rest of the year.
Our new class novel is ‘The Firework Maker’s Daughter‘. We’ll be reading this every day in class and enjoying hearing about Lila’s awesome adventure as she attempts to find the final secret in her quest to become a real firework maker.
Help at home by…
- asking your child what’s happened in the novel recently
- asking your child what they are enjoying about the book (note that this is a subtly different question to ‘Are you enjoying the book?’ where ‘No’ would be a perfectly suitable, but not that useful, answer).
- asking you child to summarise what’s happened in the book so far
Enjoying a class novel is one aspect of our reading diet in school. We know how important reading is for academic and life success so we place a huge emphasis on it. That’s why we expect you to be reading regularly at home with your child: it’s crucial!
If you’re having problems getting your child to read at home, please let us know and we’ll do our best to help.
Here’s to a great (reading-full) 2023!
Happy Christmas Everyone!
The whole of 3,4 had a ball at our Christmas party! We’re sure that you’ve heard all about it by now. There was such an atmosphere of fun! 3,4 have got some serious dance moves and singing voices.
Well done to all children in 3,4, they have worked their socks off this term and we are proud of their efforts! We’d like to wish you all a safe and Happy Christmas!
Just a few photos of everyone (to give you a sense of the fun) and the after party for 3,4 B.
See you in the New Year.
Thank you!
We have been absolutely overwhelmed by your generosity. At the recent Christmas productions, we collected for our school charity, Cancer Research UK. You didn’t let us down and you managed to raise an amazing £266.91.
Thank you so much.
3,4 A Class News
In Writing this week, we’ve continued looking at features of a promotion such as alliteration, questions and commands. We’ve started to plan our own around the artwork we’ve been creating in Topic and will be writing these next week.
In Science, we’ve continued our learning about sound and today enjoyed a talk from a sound technician who works in theatres. The children listened really well and had lots of good questions for him.
We’ve also been looking at some more different styles of architecture and in particular, focusing on the architect Zaha Hadid who designed one of the stadiums in the current Men’s World Cup. Many of us are very excited about the football! Well done 3,4 A on all your super learning this week.
Talk to a scientist
Today, we engaged in a wonderful Zoom talk with ecologist Tim Body.
The children were really fascinated about bats so we researched their sounds and species here. Why not listen and read with your child?
Later in the afternoon, we also had a chance to join with STEM science to learn about Symmetry in Snowflakes. Watch this space to see our learning …
3,4B: Book Club
Every week, we enjoy our ‘Book Club’ session. This is an opportunity for us to share what we’ve been reading at home, celebrate this and explore different books / authors.
This half-term, we’re reading books as part of a group. This means we can all discuss the same book. We enjoy this and get a lot from having a shared experience of reading.
In our ‘Book Club’ session, we discuss what we’ve been reading…
And celebrate the great work we’ve done in our reading journals…
Help at home by…
- asking your child about what they’re reading
- reading every day with your child
- being a reading role model yourself
- encouraging your child to engage with their reading record
We know it’s busy at home. But, equally, we know how important reading at home is!
Living and Learning: Mental health
Mental Health
We’ve started a three week block of living and learning lessons around mental health this week. Being able to identify and talk about feelings and emotions is an important part of mental health. In our living and learning lessons, we have shared our feelings and emotions and talked about how emotions can change and that they don’t stay the same forever. We can look after our mental health by doing this regularly.
3,4B: writing
We’ve been enjoying our writing in 3,4B recently. During our history topic, we wrote some recounts. We imagined we were an Ancient Greek warrior returning to our homeland (Athens) after a long battle.
Check out these examples…
Throughout all our writing, we’ve been learning lots of grammar. In particular, we’ve been focussing on securing our knowledge of word classes.
We’ve learnt about lots of word classes:
nouns – a person, place or thing
proper nouns – the specific name of a person, place or thing
verbs – a doing or being word
adjectives – a word that describes a noun
It’s important to remember that the word class of a word can change. A word isn’t just a noun all of the time. It depends what it’s job is in that particular sentence.
In this sentence, walked (from the verb ‘to walk’) is a verb because it’s the action that’s been done by the dog.
The dog walked to the park.
In this sentence, walk is a noun because it’s the thing that’s being done. The verb would be ‘went’ coming from the verb ‘to be’.
The dog went for a walk.
Help at home by…
- asking your child about their writing learning
- asking them to spot nouns around the house
- practising their spellings
- reading with, and to, them (ideally, every day)
3,4 A Class News
Week 3 of this term has come and gone in a flash!
In Writing, we’ve been looking at expanded noun phrases and using them to write interesting character descriptions.
In Reading, we’ve been focusing on the skill of retrieval across three different winter poems.
In Maths, we’ve been working on column subtraction and continuing to practise our times tables.
In P.E (pictured), we have been creating sequences of different static shapes in groups and then incorporating a variety of movements between each shape.
Beyond our usual lessons, we also enjoyed our themed anti-bullying day and preparing for our upcoming class assembly!
