This week, our Y4 children enjoyed a few days in the outdoors at Thornbridge. The weather was a little chilly but mostly bright and sunny.

The children’s first task was to make their bed! The boys seemed to think this entailed laying the pillow case over the pillow and similarly, laying the duvet cover over the duvet! They were somewhat shocked when they discovered there was more to bed-making than this!

During their time at Thornbridge, the children undertook the Thornbridge Challenge, which consists of a series of puzzles dotted around the site. Team work and discussion are essential if the challenges are to be completed and the Y4 children were fantastic at both

Other activities included climbing a huge cargo net, whilst fastened into a safety harness. ALL the children challenged themselves and most were able to actually stand on the beam at the very top. I was very proud of all the children and the way they encouraged each other.

The Low Ropes course proved to be lots of fun with the children negotiating a variety of obstacles along the way. To the challenge the children even further, they were given a tray of snooker balls and a small wooden plank which they had to carefully pass between them whilst working their way along a specific obstacle. Ask my group about the challenge with the water and the beakers!!

Other activities which the children enjoyed included Night Line, Bouldering and Orienteering.

All-in-all it was a wonderful few days and we hope the children will remember their experiences for many years to come.

Special thanks must also go to Mr Moran, Mrs Moore and Mrs Willoughby who gave up time with their own families to accompany the children. We are incredibly fortunate to have such dedicated staff.

What a week!  The children have started to really settle down well and we have been exploring fossils this week.  We have been describing the shapes that we find on fossils and even made some of our own fossils out of saltdough.  We have loved using the whiteboard to draw our favourite dinosaurs too.  The sad news is that we have heard that the dinosaurs are leaving us this weekend.  I wonder where in time we will travel to next week?   Watch this space!!!!!!!                                                                                                          

What an amazing first week for our new starters!  This week, dinosaurs have taken over FS2 and the children have been busy making their own dinosaurs, drawing dinosaur pictures, exploring dinosaur prints and comparing the length of bones.  We even had a letter from a dinosaur called Doris who set us a challenge to make a trap to catch her missing baby dino.  We all set to work to draw a plan before making a trap using construction equipment; and sure enough, by the end of the day, the baby dino was captured (safely of course).

Well done to all of our newbies, you have had a fantastic first week and the FS2 team are really looking forward to spending a fun and action packed first year of school with you xx

This week, we really enjoyed finding out about Africa.  We learnt some tribal dance moves, made African masks, found out about the types of animals that you may find in Africa and had a great time playing the African drums.

Congratulations to our Pop Maths team who competed at Sheffield Hallam University on Saturday morning.
Schools from all over the city entered the quiz. The questions were very tricky.
Our team co-operated really well and scored 15 out of 20, a great score!

Thank you for representing our school so well.

On Tuesday, we celebrated Chinese New Year.  First, we found out how different people celebrate around the world.  We then shared some fortune cookies and danced to some music with our fantastic Chinese dragon.

This week, we have been finding out about Chinese customs and objects.  We then discovered that it happened to be Chinese New Year next week and found out about how people celebrate by having festivals with lanterns and dancing dragons.  We thought that it would be a great idea to make our very own Chinese dragon so that we can have our own celebration next Tuesday.

Watch this space to see the end result!

We checked up on our teeth experiment this week!  We started by placing a hard boiled egg into a cup of water, another egg into some coffee and a final egg into some coca cola.  We then made some predictions as to what would happen to the eggs.  This week when we checked the eggs, we found that the best thing for us to drink that will not affect our teeth badly is the water (the egg had not changed at all).  The coffee made the egg go really brown and the coca cola made the egg shell go rough.  We then had a go at brushing the discoloured eggs with toothpaste to make them clean again!

 This week we have been finding out about our bones and how a skeleton is made.  We enjoyed drawing around our bodies with chalk outside and then thought about how our skeletons are made and drew our bones in too. We even tried to label the different bones.  Whilst we were drawing we compared the length of the different bones by measuring them in different ways.

Now that we are in December, the children have each written an advent wish which we have put on our advent display in the classroom.  Each day, we open the advent wishes of the day and try to do as the message says.  So far, we have had wishes such as ‘showing a smile to friends’ and ‘helping friends if they are hurt’.  We really look forward to each new day to see what the message will say!