Welcome to Year 4!

What a fantastic first couple of days we have had in Year 4. It was so lovely to welcome you all back in to school on Thursday and see all of your smiling faces. You settled back in to school so well.

We started our first day by playing a few games. We played a treasure hunt game which involved locating useful items around our classroom and games about our holidays. We then discussed what our rhythms and routines would look like in Year 4 and the children were able to ask any questions they had.

We then introduced our new topic for this term – The Vikings. Our whole school topic is Journeys and Discoveries and the Vikings are certainly famous for making a lot of those. Before we started to learn anything about the Vikings, the children were asked to show me what they already knew. The children answered some questions in their History books. We will come back to these same questions at the end of the term to see how much more we will then know.

Next, was our big art. We started our big art by exploring some pointillism art work. The children were given three of George Seurat's famous pieces. Before being told any more, the class were given a variety of resources to help them recreate the style of art work. We used things such as oil pastels, cotton buds, paint, bubble wrap, watercolours and more. At the end, the children were asked to explain which technique they thought recreated the style the best – we agreed it was the use of cotton buds or the end of a paint brush. After this, the children were introduced to George Seurat and his career. We talked about how pointillism was created. In his art work, Seurat uses a wide variety of colours. In order to do this in our artwork, we needed to develop our understanding of colour mixing. We talked about how we mix primary colours to create secondary and the class were introduced to tertiary colours too. To have a go at colour mixing ourselves, we created pointillism colour wheels.

All of this learning is in preparation for our big art piece. For this, we are creating Viking shields. The class were given a set of true and false cards and asked to organise them. They were all facts about Vikings shields. But, the trick was, they were all true. Did you know that Viking shields were made our of wood and stained in oil to make them water resistant? This game was a great way of learning lots of key facts about Viking shields. We then looked at some shield designs. After this, the children designed their own shield. We will be incorporating pointillism into this design.

Over our first two days, we also had PE with Mrs Jenkins and made jigsaws of what they would like me to know about themselves. We also had our first worship back in school. This took a new form in the way of worship via zoom. It was so lovely to see (virtually) others around school and share worship together.

This week you have all amazed me with your creativity, teamwork, hard work, kindness and respect. I have really enjoyed getting to know you all so far and I am looking forward to the rest of our journey through Year 4!

Miss Welch