After we have had such a wonderful array of Roman shields come into the classroom this week, we decided it was time to put them into action. We have also been looking at life in Britain before the Romans, researching the Celts. This week we have designed and created Celtic shields, using different textures and tones of colour. 

Year 4 did a brilliant ukulele and cornet concert. We’ve enjoyed learning to play these instruments although it is quite tricky and hard work. The cornets are very heavy too but it was all worth it.

In RE we’ve been looking at celebrations including weddings. To experience the event we decided to recreate a Christian wedding in order to look at some of the symbols and words associated with the ceremony and understand how it is an event shared with family and friends.

We’ve had a fun afternoon having a go at weaving like the Aztecs. Remembering to go over-under-over-under (or was it under-over-under-over?) we’ve started making colourful pieces of fabric while getting a feel for everyday Aztec life. We’ve also talked about how modern fabrics are made in a similar way.

Today we travelled back in time 500 years as we held an Aztec market. Developing our trading skills, we got to practice lots of maths as we thought about which products to put special offers on. And it wasn’t long before we got into our roles as market traders as we also learnt lots about the different foods the Aztecs ate.

We’ve been investigating the habitats of woodlice, setting up choice chambers to see whether they prefer the dark or being out in the open, or if they like damp or dry conditions. We found that most of our woodlice preferred dark, dry conditions but would explore the other areas. We thought they were perhaps out in search of food and water.

No woodlice were harmed in the course of this experiment and were returned to the wildlife garden with lots of lovely new habitat material.

We’ve been exploring spirolaterals – patterns formed by repeating simple mathematical rules. We explored different numbers of steps while turning through right-angles. A spirolateral of order 5, for example, follows these rules:

• Forward 1cm then turn
• Forward 2cm then turn
• Forward 3cm then turn
• Forward 4cm then turn
• Forward 5cm then turn
• Repeat

Each turn was 90° clockwise. However, we then decided that it would be more fun to go outside and do some giant maths by drawing large spirolateral patterns across the playground.

We took a very dizzy walk along a spirolateral of order 4 which spirals off in to infinity:

We had a fantastic afternoon in the sun searching for wildlife around the school field. We found spiders, woodlice, ants, beetles, ladybirds, centipedes and lots of other invertebrates as well as some frogs and a toad. We decided that our school provides amazing habitats for all sorts of creatures.

Today we got really active in our maths lesson as we competed in a Roman numerals relay. In teams we raced to collect our numerals before taking them back to put into numbered ordered. We all had a great lesson and discovered that Roman numerals are a lot easier to read than we first thought.

Year 4’s landscape designers have been hard at work researching, designing and presenting their ideas for a KS2 garden. They have produced designs that are both imaginative and take into account the needs of the garden area and they look very professional. Well done everyone in Year 4!