Walk to School week
Thank you to Zariaat from Living Streets for our Walk to School week assembly this afternoon.
We reminded ourselves about lots of benefits of walking to school – less traffic and pollution near the school gates, spending time with family and friends and physical and mental health improvements.
Don’t forget our prize draw on Friday for all pupils who have walked or used a park and stride option this week.
Well done to Year 2 who have recorded the most active travel journeys to school so far this year.
Brownlee Triathlon
Some of our KS2 pupils have enjoyed taking part in the Brownlee Triathlon at John Smeaton Leisure Centre in the sunshine today. They’ve completed the three elements of the triathlon – swim, bike and run.
Walk to School week
This week, we will be taking part in national Walk to School week. It looks like the perfect weather for it too!
We’re sure you’ll agree these are all great benefits of walking to school.
During Walk to School week, children who walk to school or park further away and walk the rest of the journey (park and stride) will all be entered into a prize draw to win one of five £10 vouchers at the end of the week.
We are also looking forward to hearing about what you notice on your route to school as part of our whole school homework this week.
National Walk to School week has featured in this week’s First News.
By taking a walk to school, children will be working towards our Living and Learning statement for this week.
I recognise mental health is important.
Why not try this Supermovers quiz to see how physical activity can boost children’s mental wellbeing.
It’s oh so quiet ………
Our next topic, Sound, started this week. We began by playing a game called Identify the Sound. This was great fun with some very interesting noises.
Following that, the class were asked to predict which areas in school would be the quietest and loudest. Then, off we went.
Year 4 were asked to complete their sound walk in total silence. The only sound was the beat of a drum to give them the next instruction. This was a great success!
The next part of our lesson was to find out how sounds are made and how they travel.
Using instruments and varying levels of noise, we learnt that sound is created when something vibrates and sends waves of energy (vibration) into our ears. The vibrations travel through the air particles to the ear.
- “The stronger the vibrations, the louder the sound.”
- “Sounds are fainter the further you get from the sound source.”
- “Sound changes depending on how fast or slow an object vibrates to make sound waves.”
Having discovered how sound travels through air, our next challenge will be to find out whether it can travel through water and solids.
Stay posted!
.
Shapes are everywhere!
This week, we’ve been learning about shapes. We looked at the difference between 2D and 3D shapes – ask your child if they can tell you what this is. The children have been learning the names of shapes and using mathematical language to describe them.
One child said, “Shapes are everywhere.” So, why not go on a shape hunt at home or outside? Can your child describe the shapes that they find? Send us a photo of what you find!
Computing with Kodu
LO: I can use logical reasoning to evaluate mine and others’ programs.
First, we played each other’s games and looked out for why they were successful and what we would magpie if we could.
Hifza: “The aim of our game was to try not to get killed by the cannon shooting blips and we had to get our score to twenty points. It was kind of easy because we had lots of health.”
Will: “We had a fly fish and our starting point for our rover and Kodu was at the other side. You had to get twenty apples whilst dodging the missiles from the fly fish. Ours was two player.”
Musa: “The most challenging part was making the cannon shoot the blips because at first we didn’t know what to do and it took us a long time to work it out.”
Jess: “Since our game wasn’t saved properly we had to start all over again. It was tricky but we didn’t give up and I worked with Jasraj to try and fix it.”
Harris: “Other people had different characters like a squid so I could use them as an obstacle next time.”
Leo: “Noah and I thought we might use water and hills to make it more difficult next time.”
Sami: “Even though the cannon tried to defeat us and sometimes we got destroyed, we had fun when we won at the end.”
Computing with Kodu
LO: I can use logical reasoning to improve my program.
Today, we tinkered with our games to improve their challenge and entertainment. We wanted to make fun games that were the right level of difficulty.
It was very satisfying to play our own games!
Next, we’ll play others’ games and evaluate our learning.
Computing with Kodu
LO: I can design a sequence of instructions that accomplish a goal.
Children moved towards creating their own game by programming the Kodu to eat apples to win points.
Parth: “There’s score and points and if you get an apple, you’ll score.”
Children also looked at prewritten codes and made predictions about what would happen. 
Sakina: “I think you’ll score five points per apple.”
Felix: “If you get 20 points, you will win.”
(LO: I can look at an algorithm and make a prediction.)
We also discussed how to debug algorithms that didn’t work.
Phoebe: “You need to change Kodu’s settings and show how many points you’ve got.”
We found that saying each piece of code out loud helped us figure the sequence, check for errors and make predictions.
Next time, we’ll improve our games by tinkering.
Poetry – Contrasting emotions
Written by Milo
Year 4
Living and Learning – What do you know about mental health?
On Tuesday, Year 4 were given a talk all about mental health.
What do we know about mental health?
Many thanks to Mrs Vickerman and her colleague who came into school to give this talk to the children.