Welcome to Y4/5
We currently have 26 children in our class.
Our class teacher is Miss Luke.
Miss McCabe also works in our class.
Mrs Burgess teaches in our class on Thursday afternoons.
PE
We have PE on a Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning now swimming has finished. Please ensure your child has full PE kit on those days. We do a mile run straight after lunch every day providing the weather isn’t too bad to encourage children to keep fit and healthy. Could you please ensure that children have a water bottle in school every day.
Gymnastics
Home Reading
Children will be reminded to change their home reading book once a week. If your child has a longer book that they haven’t managed to finish in a week, they can keep it longer. When your child had finished their book, they can change it on any day. If your child is a confident reader, you do not have to listen to them read aloud but it would be beneficial if you could ask them questions about their book. Please sign their reading record every night so we know your child has read.
Spellings
Your child will be given a list of spellings every week to learn for a test on Friday. Although we do lots of practising in class, it would be very helpful for the children to spend some time at home practising them and writing them out within sentences so they understand the meaning and are able to use them in their writing.
Times tables
Children should practice their times tables at home. They will be tested on this regularly. We have launched a new program called ‘Times Tables Rock stars’ to encourage children to practice more. Children have their own usernames and passwords.
As well as ‘Times Tables Rock stars,’ children will be sent challenges from what they have been learning in maths to complete on mathletics. All children have been given their own personal usernames and passwords. A link can be found below.
School Parliament
This year, the school held an election day in which children were able to vote for their Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Speaker from Year 6.
Class MP
Within classes, we held our own election where children who wanted to be elected for class MP had to stand up in front of their class mates to share their manifesto. All children in the class were then able to cast a vote to choose their winner. Our winner was Ella.
What we have been learning about
The Tudors
For the first half term, we learnt all about the Tudors and how Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth to become the first Tudor monarch. After that, we learnt all about his infamous son Henry VIII and his six wives.
We made our own Tudor Roses out of clay too.
Click on the links to view the Tudor Fact File and Art Fact File
Family Service
Year 4/5 put on a fantastic performance for their Family Service about the Tudors.
Science
This half term we are learning about living things. We will explore and use keys to identify and name a variety of living things. We will also be looking at habitats and how changes can pose dangers to living things.
Click on the link to view the Living Things Fact File
DT
Our first topic in Spring Term was healthy eating. For this topic, we learnt about different food groups and how much of each we should be eating on a daily basis. Afterwards, we researched into different sandwiches and what makes a good sandwich. We sampled different types of bread before designing and making our own healthy sandwiches.
Click on the link to view the DT Factfile
Science
This lead us on to our next science topic ‘Teeth and Eating’.
During this topic, we investigated the effects of different liquids on teeth using egg shells. Take a look at our results.
Angry Earth
In Spring 2, we learnt about what makes the earth so angry including; volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. We wrote newspaper articles about ‘The Beast from the East’ and went in role as a survivor from the Tsunami in Thailand to write a diary entry.
States of Matter
In Summer 1, our Science topic is States of Matter. We will be learning about the different states and how materiels can change states.
Mining
We were lucky enough to have two visitors for our mining topic. We had Mr Wooley from Beamish who taught us all about the history of local mining. We looked and maps and the census to see if we had any links with past miners. Also, we were lucky enough to look at some artefacts including; the davy lamp, mining helmets and coal shovels. We learnt all about the tragedy of James Clyde too. After that, we had a visit from Mr McCabe who used to work at Seaham pit. He talked to the children about what it was like to work down there. We wrote a newspaper article about the Seaham Colliery Pit Disaster and looked at how mining changed from the Victorian Era to the 1990’s.
Art – William Morris
In art, we have been learning about the famous Victorian artist, William Morris. We used his ideas to get inspired from nature. Afterwards, we created our own tiles and printed to create a wallpaper.
Beamish
We had a fabulous day at Beamish. We visited the engine room and were shown the coal trucks and cages. There was an inspection going on down the mine so we were unable to go down there. We looked in the Victorian houses before having a Victorian School lesson. Afterwards, we went to the town for lunch and got to go in the sweet shop.
Click on the link below to see our curriculum map to see what we are learning about throughout the school year.
