Sapphire Class Year 3 and 4

We are looking at a book called The King Who Banned The Dark by Emily Haworth-Booth. It is about a young boy who grows up to be king. He has had a fear of the dark ever since he was little so he decided to ban it when he becomes king. He is quite sneaky about how he sets it all up. He spreads horrible rumours across the kingdom so his public support him when he makes his declaration. The kingdom supports him for a while but soon become bored of having forever light. We have had lots of different writing for this unit – newspaper report, poem, letters, balanced arguments as well as character study and making predictions.

We have been working hard to learn our times tables this term. We had different songs to help us remember them. We sang the songs each lesson and for some of us it really helped to get them stuck in our heads.

We had George Ezra for 3x, Elton John for 4x, Taylor Swift for 6x and 8x Ed Sheeran for the 7x and 9x.

Once we learnt the times tables we had to then learn the related division facts which was a bit tricker for us so we were allowed to use lots of different equipment to help us see the connection between multiplying and dividing.

This term we’ve been learning about magnets and forces. We started off looking at what was magnetic. We had to test out a range of materials to see if they were attracted to the magnets or not. We were surprised to learn that not all metals are magnetic. We then looked at a lesson that Mr Ricketts likes to call, ‘Defying gravity’ (after his favourite song from the musical Wicked!). We were tasked with trying to get a paper clip ‘floating’ using a magnetic force. This was a hard lesson that required a lot of patience. After a whole load of perseverance, each group managed to get the experiment to work and we couldn’t believe it! We’ve also made compasses using a magnet, needle, bowl of water and a piece of cork. Again, another lesson which took some patience as it was quite fiddly to magnetise the needle and get it to float on the cork in the water. Once we managed that, we then used a field compass to check that ours was pointing north correctly. Our last lesson was about magnetic food. Our thinking was that if there is iron in some foods, and iron is magnetic, then would the food be magnetic too? We tested out spinach, cereal, chickpeas and iron vitamin tablets. Some groups managed to control the cereal and iron tablets with their magnets, but not the other two. We thought that maybe we would need a stronger magnet or maybe there was not enough iron in the food to react to the magnets, but it was an interesting discussion.

We loved our trip to Bristol Museum. We were allowed to explore the Egyptian gallery with our friends. We couldn’t believe that we saw real mummies and coffins. In one of the cabinets there were mummified animals – bird, cat and crocodile. We also saw ancient Egyptian jewellery that was over 3000 years old. The teachers set us tasks to find different artefacts like shabti dolls, ancient pillows, child’s toys, make up sets and canopic jars. We then had a lesson about a woman from Bristol who had visited Egypt and had brought back some amazing artefacts which she then donated to the museum. We had to figure out what each one was. Some were easy to figure out like the toys and clothing. Some of the trickier ones were linked to architecture and worship. We eventually sorted out each one and then had to arrange them in the correct boxes. It was a great day and we were lucky to have such a fab trip.

Our ukulele lessons have been a lot of fun. We started off not knowing much about how to play and by the end of the 10 weeks, we performed a mini concert to the reception pupils. We also learnt about the composers of the pieces we played like Beethoven. We really enjoyed learning to play a new instrument and some of us want to carry on playing it and have asked our parents if we can have a ukulele to keep on learning.

This term we’ve been looking at traditional lunches from across the world. It’s been interesting to see what food is eaten in different countries. We have had time to research recipes on the chrome books, looking at what kind of lunches we could cook at the end of the unit. The main countries we were interested in were Japan, Argentina, Morocco, France, Italy, Mexico and Thailand. We had to take a vote as a class to decide which one to focus on for our cooking day. It was a tie between Italy and Mexico so we had a tiebreaker vote and Mexico came out on top. We can’t wait for our cooking day where we’ll make a range of traditional meals from fajitas to tacos to burritos.