We’ve been busy in Year 4!

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Miss Goddard, Mrs Parker, Miss Hardy, Miss Thomas
Got a question? Contact us via our class email address where we can help answer your queries. Year4@stmarksce.org.uk
During the first lesson, the children were given cocktail sticks and plasticine and found different ways to make structures. They used photographs of famous and existing structures and pavilions to inspire their ideas. In this lesson, the children started to think about the importance of base shapes. They had lots of fun being creative and coming up with original designs.
In the second lesson, the children worked with cardboard strips, double sided tape and card to make a cube-like structure. The purpose of this lesson was to explore how to join materials and also how to reinforce these joins so that the structure would be more robust. The children used joinery ideas from existing structures to help them, such as triangular corner pieces and hinge-like joins.
Within our most recent lesson, the children learned about cladding by looking at photographs from real life structures. They learned about the different purposes of cladding before beginning to think about how they could use materials to clad their structure. The children were given the brief to create a Roman aesthetic design and used photos of Roman pavilions to support their thinking. They cut, rolled, folded and made marks on card before attaching this material to their structure. The results are rather convincing and certainly give a Roman appearance!
Now that the children have the skills and knowledge needed from their exploration lessons, they will begin to design their own Roman Pavilions using shapes, materials, joins and cladding of their choosing. We hope to display these once they have been created!
Hopefully you received some information last week regarding a 'Roman Soldier Day' which Year 4 are having on Thursday 3rd February. The information is attached here also as a PDF.
From the Year 4 Team
This term, Year 4 have enjoyed doing investigations during our Science Days. In Autumn 1, we became human biologists and learnt about the digestion system. The children created a model of a stomach using tights as the intestines, a sandwich bag for the stomach and funnel for the oesophagus. They had great fun seeing how the stomach breaks down the food so we can get energy. I’m sure you can imagine their reactions when the intestines created waste!
After learning about the digestive system, we moved onto learning about the function of our teeth and how liquids have different effects on them. The children made predictions and tested marble chips (to represent the teeth) by placing them into a variety of liquids to see what happened.
This term, we have learnt all about the states of matter and investigated how liquids behave differently – this is called viscosity.
We also had lots of fun learning about how solids change to liquids by melting. The children worked sensibly with the candles, after a safety briefing of course, to test 5 different solids and discover their melting points.
In our final lesson, we applied all this knowledge to see how the water cycle works. We even create our own water cycle experiment using a candle to represent the sun, water and a mirror to collect the condensation.
We are so impressed by the knowledge the children have learnt during our science days and they have enjoyed all the investigations we have done.