Millbank Primary School
Growing Together To Be Our Best
Year 4
Croeso i Blywddyn 4
Blwyddyn 4 Parents' letter: September 2018
Welcome to Blwyddyn 4 class page. We will be updating this page with pictures and examples of the work we complete in the class. Keep on visiting us for more updates.
Go Construct with Minecraft
We have taken the opportunity to use Minecraft in class. We were presented with a project where we could not build a building that had an area bigger than 100 metres squared. Here is a link for the children to download if you have downloaded Minecraft Education on PC, Mac or iPad.
Fair Trade and Eco-Fortnight
We have been working hard during our Eco and Fair Trade fortnight, we found out about palm oil and the effect that deforestation is having on our beautiful planet. We decided to make Fair Trade brownies to raise money to adopt a Gorilla. We raised £42 and we need have a new member of our class, George the Gorilla! Da iawn pawb!
Here is our certificate of adoption:
Our Visit to a Cardiff United Synagogue
What a great day we had visiting the Cardiff United Synagogue. The children found out about their place of worship and their important religious documents. Thank you for all the staff there that explained about the religion.
Sound Bytes...
Blwyddyn 4 have explored sound in science. We performed an investigation where we looked at how we can change the sound of a bottle when we hit it. We found that this experiment went wrong and we found out that the environment items we were using did not work well with the experiment. We learned a lot about how to perform an experiment.
The Hurt Boy and the Birds
During our class assembly, we listened to the poem "The Hurt Boy & The Birds." We considered what it would be like to be the boy and how he was feeling. We then thought about the actions that the other people making to hurt the boy. We used our Kagan groups then to discuss why the boy would talk the birds. We came up with the ideas that they would not make a comment; they would listen and they would not judge us.
Artes Mundi at Cardiff Museum
We visited Cardiff Museum to see the Artes Mundi exhibit. The exhibit is about what is like to live in different cultures. Our topic is the UK this term and with Blywddyn 1, we're going to try and represent through Expressive Arts what it is like to live in Wales and the UK. We experienced a lot of different types of art to help us understand how we can express ourselves. The staff were extremely helpful and gave us a chance to experiment with different materials too.
Sounds and vibrations
The children have been exploring sound. We have used slow motion cameras to see how a musical instruments vibrate. With further experimentation we found that strings cans make higher sounds when they are shorter and shorter keys make higher notes too.
SEALs - Anti-bullying - Being a witness
We have been discussing bullying since coming back after Christmas. We have discussed how it can be a difficult to be a witness and do the right thing. The children have had thought provoking conversations about how this can cause people to feel guilty and that we must do something when we see this.
Financial Maths Week - Session Musicians
We were looking at using a spreadsheet to balance a budget in blwyddyn 4. We were working with singer, Arianna Grande, who had £150 to spend on session musicians for her next album. The children had to use the spreadsheet to find out how many hours they could afford to spend on certain musicians.
Bar modelling
We are using bar modelling to find out what we need to do in 2 step word problems.
Blwyddyn 4 R.E. Topic Board
Wind and Fire Table Top Poetry
The children have been learning about the festival Pentecost. We have discovered that Christian's think about the Holy Spirit and how it came to the disciples as wind and tongues of fire. We created some poetry about these on our tables.
Andy Warhol Biographies
Blwyddyn 4 were researching the famous 20th Century Artist, Andy Warhol. They researched using Encyclopedia Britannica website through HWB. We know we can trust the information on this website. Here are a couple of examples of the work we created.
What is the best material to protect a mobile phone?
Blwyddyn 4 were testing materials. After asking a number of questions we settled on finding out which material would be the best to protect a mobile phone from a drop. We decided to drop the phone from 85cm as that was the height of Mr Blears' pocket. As we can't afford a number of mobile phones we tested it using lego bricks. We found out the best material was sponge as the material was more flexible than ridged materials like wood and metal. We did find some problems with our testing as we think that all the materials should have been the same thickness but overall we think our investigation was done fairly.
Our Banned Materials Posters
We were looking at the properties of materials. The children, made for against arguments using the properties of the different materials. We assessed how well we presented our posters using Seesaw.
Origami Instruction Videos
Before writing our own instructions on how to make an origami piano, we recorded youtube instruction videos showing how to make our origami pianos. We used iMovie to edit the video together.
