Category: Year4

RockStars proved to be hugely popular last year and helped the children to make considerable progress in learning their times tables facts.

As it is a new school year, we have reset the children’s RockStars accounts. Teachers will be handing out their logins this week.

RockStars is continuously improving with new features; this year, it has some new tools which help to assess where your child is currently with their times tables knowledge in order to tailor some of the questions to suit their needs and also give feedback to their teacher.

When your child first logs in, they will first need to choose a new ‘rockstar’ name. It would then be beneficial for them to play the ‘Gig’ as this gives an initial assessment and a baseline speed so that they and their teachers can see their progress over time.

If you have any questions, please pop in and speak to the class teacher.

We had a great day on 10th July celebrating the end of our Roman topic.  The children’s costumes looked fantastic – thank you parents for all your support with this.

We began the day creating old Roman scrolls with important Roman numerals on them.  Then we used a tricky painting technique to create a Roman mosaic.

After lunch, we marched around the grounds as a Roman army, did some chariot racing and had a Roman feast.

Here are a few photos from our day.

This week Year 4 have taken part in the multiplication tables check national pilot.  This involved children answering 3 practice questions followed by 25 times table questions.  The children then had the opportunity to give their personal feedback on the process.

We were very impressed with the children’s attitudes towards the check and their mature approach to answering the questions.  It was great to see them applying the TTRockstar skills to another context.

Well done Year 4!

At the beginning of this week, the Air Quality Team thoroughly enjoyed their prize-winning donutting experience at Alpine Snowsports Centre in Aldershot.  There was plenty of fun and laughter and a great time was had by all.  The children loved being active and outside in the fresh air.  We were really proud of how well they represented the school and it was a well-deserved celebration of their fantastic air quality project campaign.

As I am sure you have heard, we launched our Roman topic with a fantastic Roman workshop this week. All the children loved the activities, learnt a lot and now have lots of questions which we hope to answer over the coming weeks.  Here are some photos to give you a taste of our day.

To launch our new Roman topic, we have a special visitor coming in to give children a whole day of Roman experiences. This will be on Wednesday 12^th June.  As you can appreciate, there will be a cost to buy in this experience for the day. We are looking for a £3 voluntary contribution for this fabulous opportunity. Please send this into school with your child in a named envelope, with Year 4 Roman day written on it.  Look out for photos from the day at the end of next week!

The Year 4 Team

We had a great visit to the Gordon Brown Centre.  The children were a real credit to St Mark’s and demonstrated all of our learning behaviours throughout the day.  Risk-taking and teamwork were evident for both the low ropes course and orienteering.  It was great to be able to respectfully explore the site in order to find a range of living things within the woodland food chain.  Thank you to the staff and parents who supported the trip in all weathers!

We are really looking forward to our trip next week. Here are a few reminders about what the children need to bring:-

• a packed lunch and water bottle in a rucksack
• wellies or spare pair of shoes in a named carrier bag
• sunhat and sun cream
• waterproof jacket

Children need to wear their normal school T-shirt and jumper/cardigan but due to the nature of the activities, children should wear dark jogging bottoms or leggings and trainers.

The Year 4 Team

For your Easter homework we would like to challenge you to create a piece of art to display in our Year 4 pop up gallery.

The theme is spring.  When you are outside over the holidays take, some inspiration or even some photos and create some art based on what you see. Design and make an A3 or A4 sized representation of your ideas – you can use any medium you like.

Here are a few suggestions but we will be happy with any style as long as it is 2D.

• Paint a picture
• Make a collage using natural resources, wool or different types of paper
• Printing
• Photo montage

Please bring your art work into school by Wednesday 24^th April.

We would like to invite your parents to visit the pop up gallery on Friday 26^th April from 3pm when you can take them around the classrooms to show them everyone’s work.

We are so pleased with all of the hard work that the children have put into learning their words, actions and dances for He’s Alive. The dress rehearsal was a great success yesterday afternoon, they made us really proud.

We look forward to seeing you at the productions over the next few days.