Our current focus value, perseverance, was put to the test today as we were challenged to solve a series of mathematical problems in order to escape the castle.  Each step provided a completely different challenge and had to be solved in order to start the next.

Did we give up? No we didn’t!

This term we’ve been battling the weather to learn tennis (sun, fog, rain and snow – we’ve been out in all of them at some point.) Here we are developing our forehand skills through our own games before combining our ideas to make a relay race.

To celebrate World Book Day, 4RF sat reading and discussing books of some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays – from Hamlet to A Midsummer’s Night Dream, from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth. Then we watched a performance of a famous speech from Henry V! We loved these stories and wanted to read more…

We have been designing a new book corner for our classroom. We came up with lots of ideas… Hogwarts, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Beastquest, jungles, underwater and space themes to name just a few.

This week we’ve been learning about fractions. On Wednesday we were given a collection of objects which we had to find three-quarters of. The four counters and the square of paper were simple enough but then we had to start to think… Surely Dr Fishwick didn’t expect us to cut up a 20p piece?   We found lots of different ways of making three-quarters, sometimes we even had different ways of dividing up the same objects.

4RF had a fantastic time this morning building a minibeast hotel. We used some old fencing panel along with sawn-up branches, pine cones, leaves, sticks and the hollow stems of cow parsley that we had collected from around the school field to produce a range of habitats for beetles, bugs and woodlice. We can’t wait to see what guests come to stay later in the year.

As part of Eco week, we’ve been designing gardens to encourage wildlife around the school. We learned about how bees are important and researched lots of ideas which would help bees and other wildlife. We then looked at the school garden and thought about how we could include these ideas. Finally, we produced our garden designs using our fantastic new watercolour paints (thank you PTA!)

We had an awesome time helping to plant 1000 trees in Lickey Woods.

We walked to the Lickey Hills where we worked with ‘Birmingham Trees for Life’ and the Lickey Rangers. We were shown how to use a spade properly and they showed us how to plant and protect the baby trees. It was really muddy too!

Today we sketched a wide selection of animal bones and skulls! It was very fun for the class. We drew like sheep skulls an rat skulls we also looked at a big thigh bone from a pony. Would you like to look at our fantastic sketches?

Today we learnt how to count in French, in tens, to 100! We had a piece of paper which told us how to spell the numbers in French. Next we had to make up a game including French numbers!