Welcome to Antarctica class!
Miss Hodkinson
Year 4
Link for YHA National Forest for images and virtual tours.
https://www.yha.org.uk/hostel/yha-national-forest
Link to conkers for images and information regarding activities.
Please find the checklist given out during the information evening in the documents section at the bottom of this page.
Class notice board
Key dates
25th May – INSET Day
28th May – 3rd June – May Half Term
4th June – INSET Day
5th June – School Reopens
8th June – School Photos
18th – 20th June – Residential Trip
6th July – Year 4 Topic afternoon for parents.
11th July – Sports Day
18th July – Trust Awards (invite only)
25th July – Last day of term
Important information
Newsletters
Each half term we will send out a class newsletter with lots of information regarding our learning, exciting dates and things to remember. A copy will also be available to download below.
Star of the week
Year 4 voted:
Tyler Jones
as our star of the week!
They wowed us this week by
showing resilience and maturity when faced with problem.
Well done!
Certificates of achievement
Who has excelled themselves and shown our school values this week?
15.09.2017 - Toby Jackson
22.09.2017 - Elizabeth Samuel for taking part in all sessions with enthusiasm showing true determination in her learning.
29.09.2017 - Jay Cosgrove for being a responsible learner and showing a positive attitude. He has really wowed Miss Hodkinson and Mrs Boaler this week for his mature attitude in his learning.
06.10.2017 - Miley-Rose Anderson for showing perseverance and pride in her maths learning. She was so proud of her achievements and so were all of us.
13.10.2017 - Rory Tideswell for showing pride in his writing and working hard to make it the best it can possibly be! In his writing Rory independently used a WOW sentence - "when the next bullet colleded with my left ear, I felt a rush of emotions and pain".
20.10.2017 - Whole class recognition for behaviour on trip to the Jorvik Centre.
03.11.2017 - Freyr Smith for showing enthusiasm and enjoyment in guided reading this week. He has been eager to share ideas and provide us with lots of exciting information.
10.11.2017 - Rosie Rowley for always showing a mature and positive attitude to learning. In lessons Rosie always takes responsibility for her own learning and the learning of others.
17.11.2017 - Archie Straw for reaching for the stars in his Maths. He has truly demonstrated true aspiration and achieved great things!
24.11.2017 - Harriet Walker has really wowed us since the start of this term. Every week Harriet bounces into class and produces a spelling list to show her practicing at home. Each week she achieves a high score in spelling tests and we can see why! Well done Harriet keep it up :)
01.12.2017 - INSET day
08.12.2017 - Chelsea Coghill-Black showed fantastic enthusiasm and enjoyment in our Christingle singing practices!
15.12.2018 - Lexi Warriner being recognised by an outside visitor for her beautiful reading and positive attitude to learning.
22.12.2018 - Antarctica class reaching for the stars in all their lessons. They have demonstrated true aspiration through this term and achieved great things!
During the Spring term, Year 4 were swimming every Friday afternoon.
20.04.2018 - Gemma Willings was awarded a perseverance award for her determination and enthusiasm in lessons. Gemma always has a "can do" attitude and it shows in her work in all lessons.
27.04.2018 - Rory Tideswell was awarded a responsibility award for being able to give his own writing target and explain why he had chosen to work on that using technical language.
04.05.2018 - Toby Jackson was awarded a perseverance award for persevering with his writing and his week saying “Writing isn’t as scary as I thought it was”. What a lovely change in mindset!
11.05.2018 - Jack Banyard was awarded a responsibility award for taking responsibility of his own learning by focussing on his reading signatures for the week and celebrating his achievements.
18.05.2018 - Lexi Warriner was awarded a creativity award for writing a beautiful paragraph about how we hear sound and using her writing targets even in a topic session.
Future sports leaders - 23.07.2018
Today we had a coaching session with Mr Bishop. We learnt lots of new sports games and then had a go at teaching others. The purpose of this was to see who will be our new sports leaders next year. Mr Bishop was particularly impressed with Roman for the way he explained the game with confidence and helped others to understand it.
Exciting electricity - 13.07.2018
Today we had some extra special visitors in school to teach us all about electricity ALL DAY! It was so much fun. They even brought us some fantastic equipment to play around with. To begin with we had a brainstorm activity all about what we can do because of light bulbs and what we did before light bulbs.
Then we had our very own circuits to play with and created a circuit with a battery and light bulb and were challenged to make it light up! It was great and we all rose to the challenge and more!
We even then managed to introduce motors and switches. After lunch we wrote about our circuits and drew what it looked like. Finally we learnt all about the infamous Thomas Edison and his contribution to life as we know it. What a brilliant day!
Creating a human compass - 02.07.2018
To begin our Maths topic: geometry - properties of shapes, we went outside and used simple instructions to create our very own human compass. This involved reading the instructions and understanding what a right angle is and lacing people in the north, south, east and west position. Everyone managed this and some of us even managed the challenge of understanding how a right angle relates to a full turn and half a turn. It was great and we could use this understanding later on in the lesson in our tasks.
Something fishy - 27.06.2018
As part of our writing she's sent this week we wrote a narrative based on the video called "something fishy". This video showed a young girl washing her clothes at a launderette when all of a sudden she noticed that the washing machine wasn't as normal! The language used was incredible and it really helped us all to write inventive and creative stories. The children were so excited they even wanted to bring copies home! Here you can see the thoughts we wrote down together after watching the video only once! There were some fantastic suggestions and we had lots of fun brainstorming as a class.
Maypole movers! - 21.06.2018
Today we were lucky enough to go outside onto the school field and learn how to maypole dance. We had lot so far fun and learnt three different dances to traditional maypole music. We really enjoyed it and loved seeing the pretty patterns we created with the ribbons. It was great fun to see it at the summer fair later on as well!!
Residential update!
Today we have had a jam packed day!
The children slept really well and woke up to a fantastic breakfast! Croissants, cereals, toast and a full English!
After this we headed to Conkers and had a go on the low-ropes & the climbing wall. Every single child managed to walk up to the ledge and the majority of them made it all the way around. We are so proud of each and every one of them! There were lots of very proud faces.
Then we had some lunch and had a goose attack!
In the afternoon, we went on a barefoot walk in the forest and then had a mini beast hunt and created our very own bug hotels.
To end the day we are relaxing on the grass at our hostel playing games and football.
Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow!
Residential update!
We have had a fantastic day so far: adventure playground, lunch in the forest, train ride to Conkers and shelter building.
We have had dinner (it was yummy!) and are about to go and watch the world cup :)
A very exciting delivery - 05.06.2018
What an incredible way to celebrate the start of a half term!
Watch this space to see what Miss Hodkinson received during the half term break.
Roman "I was walking around the corridors and my smile felt bigger than my face!"
The adventures of Sherlock Holmes! - 24.05.2018
During today’s lesson, we re-enacted a scene from Sherlock Holmes using the play script entitled “The veiled lady”. This play script was originally written by a famous author called Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) who created the character “Sherlock Holmes”. Specifically this passage is a dramatization of a scene from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”. Below you can see some of us getting into character! We particularly enjoyed the actions and facial expressions that had been inferred from the story alongside the stage directions in italics.
How do we hear? - 17.05.2018
Today we continued our work on understanding how we hear sound and wrote a diary entry from the perspective of a sound wave. We wrote in past tense and in first person to describe the journey a sound wave takes from the source of the sound to our brain, including the sticky ear wax in the ear canal!
This also gave us the opportunity to use our writing targets from English to develop our writing.
Here are some fantastic examples of our writing:
Getting creative in guided reading! - 10.05.2018
This week we have been studying a fantastic video about a child called Alma.
To begin with we watched the video in 20 second incremements and tried to predic twhat would happen next. This was fab but quite annoying as the video was so exciting!
Eventually, at the end of the week we wrote our very own stories based on this video. It was fascinating to read them all as they were all different despite being based on the same stimulus!
Chelsea said "It was cool learning about the mysterious doll, we kept wanting to learn more"
Check out some of our writing below!
Making money in Maths! - 01.05.2018
Today marked the start of our money topic in Maths. We applied our understanding of decimals to separate values of money and create part whole models to help us!
Archie said "I enjoyed our money topic because sometimes it has decimals and I love decimals and I love money".
Rory said " what i liked this week is the money because we even got to do a role-play!".
Writing to royalty! - 25.04.2018
This week we have been innovating a model letter. As there was a lot of excitement surrounding the birth of the royal baby, lots of us decided to write our letters to either Prince William or Princess Catherine.
Abbie said "It was super fun because we could decide on exactly what we wanted to say to the royal family!"
Miley said "This was so exciting as we were waiting very impatiently to find out the name of the royal baby and then we could even write to them personally!"
Fun in the sun! - 18.04.2018
Today we made the most of the sun being out!
We went outside and took photos on the iPads of colours we associate with Summer. We took some amazing photos, have a look in the slideshow below!
Poo from the past! - 12.03.2018
To launch "British Science Week" 2018, we took to exploring the outdoors.
In the lesson we had an experiments sheet to explain how to make dinosaur poo! We used flour, oil, brown poster paint and nuts and seeds (for added authenticity) and combined in a bowl. We had to get our hands dirty and created our own dinosaur's poo!
WARNING: Gross images below!
28.02.2018 - SNOW!
What a strange week! The children acted so mature on Wednesday morning and were super resilient when it came to organising getting home.
Who completed Mrs Ingle's challenge?
19.02.2018 - Hope you all have a fantastic half term!
Bon anniversaire! - 30.01.2018
Every other week, the children take part in French lessons with Mrs Perkin. They show enthusiasm and respect in all lessons but when I walked into the lesson on Tuesday, I was blown away! The children broke into song singing "Happy Birthday!" (I'll remind them of this on my actual birthday). They were so rpodu fo themselves and wanted to share all their learning with me from that day. Here are some children reading their work in French. Tres Bien!
Letters to prospective teachers! - 23.01.2018
This week, the children have been writing letters to teachers who may be interested in working in our fantastic school. We have discussed what makes our school special and what makes a good teacher. The response from all children has been amazing and they have produced some outstanding pieces of work.
Have a look below at some examples:
Assessment week - 15th January - 19th January
This week was assessment week. A great chance to show off all the hard work the children have been putting in and their achievements over the past half term. The children showed perseverance, dedication to their learning and resilience when times got tough!
Well done to everyone in Antarctica class, you made Miss Hodkinson proud once again!
Murderer in Bilsthorpe - 11.01.2018
On the morning of the 11th January 2018 Miss Hodkinson made a gruesome discovery.
Beloved TV character SpongeBob Squarepants had been murdered!
Poor SpongeBob!
We had to decide how much wood we would need to make a coffin for him. We counted the squares around the outside and decided that this would involve perimeter (the area around the outside of a shape).
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
WINNER! - 18.12.2017
What an exciting way to end the year! In our class we had a very excited little boy who won the raffle for the fantastic scooter. What a great start to Christmas.
Our fantastic Christingle service - 13.12.2017
A massive thank you to everyone who helped to organise our Christingle service. An extra special thank you to the scouts for donating the Christingles themselves, they were beautiful!
The children again did us all proud and did a fantastic job of singing and thank you to everyone who came to make this a special evening for them.
SNOW! - 11.12.2017
Wow what a beautiful thing to wake up to. Despite the tricky conditions getting to school, everyone acted maturely and followed all instructions to ensure we could keep them safe. In the afternoon we decided to make the most of the snow and went onto the playground and had a snowman making competition. I think you'll agree, Antarctica's snowman was extra special.
Detectives with division - 05.12.2017
This week our focus in Maths has been division. We have been developing our understanding using a range of resources.
On Tuesday we used: cubes; base ten; Numicon; bar models and place value counters. This really helped us when showing division as sharing or chunking.
Here are some pictures to show our method:
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! - 01.12.2017
This week we created something magical! As part of a whole school competition we created our very own Christmas door. Each person created a snowflake which created a snowy scene. I think you'll agree it's a lovely entrance for our classroom.
Amazing metaphors - 20.11.2017
Today we have been learning about similes and metaphors. We have looked at comparing the two and writing some of our own. Below are some fantastic examples of how you can use similes and metaphors to describe Antarctica:
Jayla - "Antarctica is a slippery ice rink".
Harley - "The glacier was the cold air on a winter's day".
Tyler - "The deep sea colossal as Mount Everest".
Elizabeth - "The snow was as sparkly lapis lazuli".
We are all odd socks really - week beginning 13th November 2017
This week was anti-bullying week. This year the focus for anti-bullying week was "all different, all equal". In school we have dedicated this week to recognising and celebrating us all being unique and those traits that make us US!
Nikos "I have noticed that everyone is different in their own way and that is OK!"
Jayla "I have learnt that every sock is like everyone's personality and it's OK to be different"
Lexi "I have learnt it doesn't matter if you have glasses, dark hair or different coloured skin, we are all special!"
Here are some of our fantastic odd socks that we created:
Planting poppies - 10.11.2017
Today, was a very special day at Bilsthorpe Flying High Academy. The children all made poppies and wrote lovely messages on them, we then went out and completed a 2 minutes silence. All of the children made me incredibly proud and were respectful when stood there. The poppies look amazing and the children did us all proud.
Relaxing reading - 01.11.2017
As a class, we decided that reading sat upright at our desks in silence is not the way forward. Now we turn the lights out, put relaxing music on and put out feet on the desks. This is proven to make reading a more enjoyable activity and gives us all something to look forward to!
Miley "it's so relaxing, putting our feet on the table means we feel more at home".
Freyr "Usually I get stressed at school but knowing we will be reading in this way helps me stay calm and relax".
Tyler "I really like it because it feels relaxing and nice".
Letters/ communication home.
Key documents
Big question
"Would you survive without music?"
We've loved watching this video to help us learn all the technical terms and the process h=of how our ears help us to hear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMXoHKwWmU8
Here are some helpful websites to help with research/ additional learning at home:
http://www.primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/revision/Science/sounds.html
https://www.theschoolrun.com/what-is-sound
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks2/science/physical_processes/changing_sounds/play/
https://www.legendsoflearning.com/learning-objectives/sound-waves/