Welcome back and what a fantastic start to the new term we have had.  This week is European code week and we would like to thank Inspire learning and all the staff and pupils involved in bringing us a wonderful live session today.

The children were asked to come up with an idea for a new app, plan what it would do, create an icon for the app and finally create a prototype home screen for it.  You might like to ask to see some of their work at home – it’s all saved on their iPads within Keynote.  (with some finishing touches required – it was a very busy session!!!) They all had some brilliant ideas.

We would also like to say a huge thank you to the P7’s who came to give us a brilliant tutorial on using Keynote.  It proved very helpful ahead our session today.

We’ve had lots of new learning as well as lots of fun setting up various features of our iPads over the last couple of days.  The children have now created and named folders so that they can save their work in a structured way.   We have created a P4 team in Microsoft Teams and we are showing the children how this works and how to navigate around it.  P4a had a go at logging in today and everyone successfully accessed this weeks spellings.  Maybe they can give you a demo. We have also introduced the children to the Self Service function (which is essentially an SBC version of the App Store).  The children may install any app from there and occasionally they will be asked to install a specific one for a class based task.  We ask that this is done at home as it can take a very long time if there are 26 iPads all trying to install it at the same during the lesson. There will be teething problems as we go but this is just demonstrating how good at problem solving and how resilient the children are.

If you could ensure all iPads are charged daily and that you frequently check for updates – iOS 15.0 is coming very soon, if it’s not already available.  (You find this in Settings—–General——Software Updates)

This week we are continuing with place value and we are beginning to explore symmetry.  There are a couple of links on the Supporting Learning at Home tab so you can play some related games at home.

Here are our spellings for this week

Please choose 8 spellings to work on this week.  You can choose all 8 from one list or you can mix and match depending on the level of challenge you would like.

This will have been discussed and suggestions will be made in class each week.

Today we looked at some of Quentin Blakes illustrations and had a go at creating our own cartoon style faces using some of his techniques.
We did some very quick sketches using some of the facial features he uses. We then put a watercolour wash over them and finally added the detail back in using a fine black ink pen.
I think the results are fantastic. The tidying up wasn’t too bad either.

Welcome to P4a

What a busy start to the term we have had.

The children have all settled in brilliantly and it is so lovely to see them all ready to learn every morning.

We will use this page to share some of our learning with you and to give you links to various websites with games or activities you might like to do to support the learning taking place in class. (See the useful links tab)

We will also share the spelling words each week and hopefully we’ll have some super photo’s we can share with you too.

The children may have been talking about our class novel – Georges Marvellous Medicine, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed the story so far and we’ve had some good fun coming up with adjectives to describe Grandma and George.  We have been acting out some scenes from the book, creating  some dialogue of our own and recording it as a play script.  We are also looking at Quentin Blake’s style of illustration and using that to create some wonderful artwork of our own. (we’ll share that with you shortly).

In the mean time, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and keep an eye on the blog for more information.