With one and a half days remaining in the term, we've done all but one of the History Project presentations. So many children clearly put s lot of good work into the work, and they should be proud of what they've done and what they've learnt during the term.


We've done a lot of finishing up of things like science, watched both the EYFS and the Key Stage 1 concerts and took a trip to the local church. We did an art project based on symmetry in Maths and even managed to get one last extended writing in.


We now have Monday and part of Tuesday remaining. We're going to do a turnout of the classroom among other things, so be prepared to see things like PE kits and maybe all of those jumpers your child has not been taking home. For the weekend, get some rest amidst the last minute shopping and we will see the children on Monday.

We have one week and one point five days to go until Christmas break and it is obvious at this point that everyone has sugar plums dancing through their heads. We have quite a few things to finish up next week and I have some fun activities planned. No spoilers!


One of the big things to finish up, of course, is our Egyptians topic, and that means homework projects. I was happy to see many of you at the homework project display on Wednesday, where we got to see lots of amazing work about the Ancient Egyptians and their exotic and ancient artefacts. Over the course of this week and next week, the children will be giving their project presentations and showing off their hard work. So far we have seen Nick's, Max's, Oscar's, Izzy's and Harry's and they have all been of high quality with plenty of information and clever artefacts. I look forward to seeing the rest of them over the course of the week.


We are also finishing up our science topic on digestion and will be doing some work on the digestive organs next week for a wall display. It will be the first big research project the children will undertake, so we'll see how that works during Christmas season.


We will finish up our PE unit on dance and the children will show me what skills they have acquired during the course of the term.


In English, the children have worked hard to retell a story based on a video we watched together called the Dream Giver. Next week, they will be rewriting it with their own characters and dreams placed into the story. It will be their last extended writing of the term, and I am delighted to see how far so many of the children have come in their writing.


We are continuing to work on issues of friendship, honesty and sportsmanship as a class, and have been especially working on giving each other genuine compliments. These are skills every child needs reinforced throughout their childhood years. The Christmas season is a wonderful time to remind us all of the ideal of good will towards all people.


So, to finish up this penultimate blog of the Autumn Term (where does the time go?), we will be doing a mix of some hard work and fun activities to end the calendar year together. Have a good weekend, and try not to think about how many shopping days are left until Christmas.

Apologies that it has been a few weeks. As you are doubtless aware, the end of the year brings all sorts of new reasons to feel hectic. With the Christmas holiday rapidly approaching as well as the end of term, we are both gearing up and winding down at the same time, preparing to finish several things off whilst also looking to the Spring term approaching.




In English, the children have had a few challenges. We had anti-bullying week last week, and the national theme this year was "Power for Good" and the first thing it made me think of was the famous line from Spider-man comics, "With great power comes great responsibility." It was only a short logical jump from that to the idea of having the children create their own super heroes who would fight bullying. We had quite a few imaginative hero designs, including a hero with a magical moustache and one with special laser vision that could make a bully into a friend.


From there we designed comic strips of out hero fighting the bully, and used that as a template for writing dialogue using all the proper punctuation and formatting. The children were so proud of their comics that Ms Roberts (the head teacher) agreed to let them show them off in the assembly the next Monday.


After that we spent a week on two of the most famous people associated with Ancient Egypt: Howard Carter and King Tut. We spent a week exploring Tut's tomb and the story behind it, and at the end of the week the children wrote some brilliant diary entries as if they were the famous Egyptologist himself.


In Science, we spent a couple of days experimenting with egg shells and different liquids as part of our topic on Digestion. This was an experiment they had done last year, but this time we were more rigorous in our science and more thorough in our results. We also got to practise lab safety around unknown liquids by using tweezers to touch everything and wearing goggles to protect our eyes. In reality, the most volatile substance they had to deal with was orange juice, but it was good practice for future experiments.


Our History topic on Ancient Egypt is coming to an end, as you are all no doubt aware by helping your children put the finishing touches on their end of term projects. As a gentle reminder, they are due in on Monday (the fifth) and the children will be presenting their projects starting Monday afternoon.


On Wednesday they will be putting their projects on display for parents to see from 3:15 to 3:45. I can say that the projects I've had in already have been imaginative and well-made and I think the children have a lot to be proud of, so I encourage you all to come in and see what the class has produced.


I think that brings us up to date, for the most part. We have a two-week push to the end of the term!

It's Remembrance Day and we observed it with an extra-long assembly this morning where each class got to show off its work from the last two weeks. Class 4 had produced a large number of brilliant haikus and tankas, and it was very difficult to choose four speakers from the class of 29. Hopefully I'll be able to give everyone a chance to show off their skills in future assemblies, but in the meantime, almost everyone managed to produce at least one good, proper haiku on a Remembrance theme, so they should be proud.


We finally finished our two week unit on explanations (with a small interruption for Remembrance Day) by writing about the some of the theories about how the pyramids were built. I think that pyramid construction is especially good at capturing childhood imaginations, especially for boys, and I got some really good work from them as a result.


We delved into bar charts and fractions in maths this week. In science we are continuing our study of teeth and digestion, and we compared everyday foods for their sugar content to see how damaging they are to our teeth. The results were not what was predicted, which is always fun to find. In history we examined the Ancient Egyptian method of barter used instead of money.


Next week is Anti-Bullying Week, and we will have several writing and creative lessons built around being a good friend and recognising bullying as opposed to being rude or mean.


After that, we really only have a little more than three weeks left to the Autumn term. We will be collecting and presenting the long-term homework project at the start of week 12, just as a gentle reminder. I expect to be able to listen to and assess all of the homework projects in the last two weeks of term.

With half a term under our belts we are charging ahead full until Christmas. I've had the privilege of meeting most of you and having a chat about your student, and apologies again to those of you who caught me close to seven last night--my brain had stopped working.


We've spent a week looking at converting different units of measurement including metres, litres, grams, time and money. In English we had a look at Remembrance Day and wrote some amazing haikus for our Remembrance Day assembly next week.


We started looking at a new song to create a dance around in PE. Over the next six weeks or so we will be inventing and performing that dance. We also started a new topic in science--Digestion and Teeth--and will be looking at how we process foods and why nutrition is important.


We've started a unit on the Nativity Story in RE and are working as a class on what it takes to be a good friend. And in history we spent time looking at the Nile as a system of transport and built boats out of straw.


Now for a much-needed weekend as we head towards winter.

Apologies for forgetting the Class 4 blog last week. Certain events took me away from my desk on Friday afternoon and by the time I was finished it was time to go home and the blog passed out of my mind until about four o'clock on Sunday afternoon. So I now have two weeks to catch up on.


Last week we looked at black sports figures as part of Black History Month (which is in October over here). After doing some research on all sorts of sporting 'pioneers', we settled on studying Jackie Robinson, the first black man of the 20th Century to join a Major League baseball team. We discussed the idea of segregation in the American south and the idea of "separate but equal" that was entrenched in US law at the time. We researched how Robinson was treated by fans, other teams, and even his fellow players in the first few years. We then wrote a formal letter to Robinson asking him about how he managed to persevere and even help the Dodgers win several championships.


We carried the baseball theme over to art last week when Mrs Pearcy helped us cut out silhouettes of baseball players and painted them to look like they were moving.


The whole thing culminated in assemblies yesterday when they whole school got together and showed off the work they were doing. Class 4 re-enacted a famous scene where Robinson was helped during one moment when the fans were being especially abusive and a fellow player, Pee Wee Reese, came over and put his arms around Robinson, hushing the crowd. We read out one of our letters and showed off some of our art. The work that the school did will be compiled into a portfolio so that people can see the work that Sandridge produced.


We finished up our science topic on classification of living things over the last two weeks, the children becoming quite adept at making branching databases for finding similarities and differences between life forms. Then they did their own research on the different classes of animals and presented the information to the other students.


We explored mummification and pyramids in our Egypt topic, looking at the ways they changed over hundreds of years. We learned the proper procedure for creating a mummy and what a canopic jar is for, and then we looked at the history of their tombs, angled buildings called "mastabas" that became the pyramids we all know today.


We also finished up our work on the Haka dance and improvising moves to go along with it. We will switch to a new type of dancing after the half term that should allow us a bit more freedom to try out some interesting moves. With Mr Clark, they just finished of playing football, and the class really came together in the last game and started working well as teams! Here's to hoping that trend continues in all other endeavours.


So, we will meet up again after a much-needed week off. As a quick reminder, there will be no spelling words until we come back, but the kids can always practice their maths, and the week-long break may be a great time to catch up on the big project, which is due in five weeks!


Have a good half term break!

This is the first week when it has really felt like autumn outside. We can't say the same thing for the classroom!


This week the children delved into the up sides and down sides of Ramesses II's long and glorious reign in a cross-curricular unit overlapping with History. They were learning how to discuss both sides of an idea as part of the Discussion unit. They are learning how to form opinions and back them up with evidence--one of the first steps towards critical thinking skills.


We explored more pharaohs and their symbols this week in History, and the children gave themselves pharaoh names like "Foremost son of Ra, noble lord of the sky." This we translated into Egyptian, so the name would be "Hat Sa Ra Neb Pet," and this would be put into a cartouche.


In science we began to look at decision trees and how they can help us to distinguish amongst many types of life forms that might be very similar to each other. A decision tree only allows a 'yes' or 'no' answer, so it allows small differences in things to distinguish them. We also looked a little bit at Carl Linnaeus and his system of classifying life forms by giving them descriptive Latin names.


We worked on dancing at different levels in PE, refining our version of the Haka war dance to include steps near the ground, kneeling over and standing up straight. The children especially love to make intimidating faces and shouts.


Next week we will be looking at Black sports figures in English as part of Black History Month, so if you get a chance to tell your child, perhaps they can think about who they might like to research and bring it with them on Monday.


Also, just another reminder that each child should be getting a new list of ten spellings every Monday in their homework books. They have until Thursday to study for it, when they will have a test. If your child arrives home on a Monday without spellings, it is not because they weren't given any.


We will probably not give out any spelling works in the last two weeks before Christmas break due to the hectic nature of that time. Other than that, expect a new list of words every Monday.


See you all next week!