Year 4 - Adams Class

Adams class has been having a great time this penultimate term exploring the sharing of cultural practices across the world. We started our inquiry looking at how one’s geographical location might influence their culture. The children looked at the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, exploring how living in a tropical environment might be different to living somewhere like the UK. This included presenting our own weather reports. We then moved onto exploring the ways that art can reflect culture, with an exploration of cultural photography and statue-making. The children identified their own personal cultural icons and made busts of them. They also edited and created their own pictures, as well as sewed their own hand puppets based off of our Reading text. The culminating activity for our lines of inquiry has been our Connecting Classrooms project, which has allowed the children to become pen pals with Year 3 students at Colegio Bilingue Madison in Monterrey, Mexico. This has been an extremely enriching experience for the children, who are hugely enjoying the opportunity to make global friendships!

In Reading we have been exploring Cinnamon by Neil Gaiman. It is a modern fairy tale set in India and features a young girl who cannot speak and is helped by a tiger in achieving her goal. Work produced included diary entries as Cinnamon, poems and limericks about various characters and our own fairy tales inspired by the text and other tales from around the world. The latter were shared with the Reception children, who enjoyed our writing a great deal!

In Maths we have continued our learning about fractions and decimals, concluding the term with developing our understanding of time. In computing we have explored coding, making patterns using the Turtle Academy programming software. In Spanish we have learnt about describing our appearance, whilst in drama we have been looking at performing in character. This term has also seen Adams class take part in swimming lessons, which the children have taken to like fish to water!

We have had so many fun activities this term, ranging from trips to the West End to learning to be the Play Leaders of tomorrow. As part of a whole-Trust initiative to combat Climate Change, Adams class joined with members of other classes to come up with ways we can save the planet and make our school a more environmentally friendly place to learn. To end the term we celebrated Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, celebrating 70 years of service. The decade we explored was the 1960s, where we learnt all about Fosse dancing and enjoyed our own cream tea whilst wearing our vintage costumes!

I cannot believe that we only have one term of this academic year left and it feels very bittersweet to be entering Term 6 knowing this. However, I know that Adams class will make the very best of each moment left in Year 4 and will continue to be the incredible learners that they have been since Day One!