Class Four

Crime and Punishment

 in Class Four / History / Whole School by

Year 5 + 6 enjoyed a thought-provoking, informative and engaging trip to the Police Museum and Victorian Courthouse in Ripon.

In our topic so far we have been looking at law and order in earlier times including during The Roman Empire, Anglo-Saxon Britain and during the 18th century when over 200 crimes were punishable by death.  During out visit this week, our attention was turned to the 19th century with the introduction of prisons, the police force (originally know as the ‘Peelers’) and The House of Correction!

During the afternoon, we had an opportunity to travel back in time 200 years to a Victorian Courthouse.   Taking the identities of all sorts of different characters, we role-played the trial of William Stokes who was accused of taking a horse and cart from a local farmer.  Despite the range of evidence that almost proved his guilt, the jury overwhelmingly decided on his innocence.  In Victorian times he would have undoubtedly been hanged, but in our discussions, this 21st century jury were  not convinced beyond reasonable doubt that he was the perpetrator and therefore believed that justice could only be served by his release.

A Shocking Series of Lessons

 in Class Four / Design and Technology / Science by

Class 4 have been getting stuck into their science topic this term by constructing electrical circuits! We’ve learned what a circuit needs in order to function, we’ve built a range of different circuits and we’ve also tested the impact of making changes to our circuits.

Once we’ve learned all we can, we will be using our Design and Technology skills to then build a “Steady Hand” game to take home. Take a look at the gallery below for a sneak-peek into our process!

Getting the Measure of the Situation

 in Class Four / Maths by

Class 4 have had a busy few weeks! Alongside SATs for our older pupils, we have also been getting out and about in the school grounds to answer the question “how can we measure that?”

To make sense of the world around us, it’s good to have a way of talking about the sizes of things. We could measure the distance of a line (perhaps in meters), the area of a 2d shape (meters squared) or the volume of a shape (meters cubed!) If we had a really awkward 3d shape, we could also measure its’ volume in liters.

We’ve been measuring all sorts of things in all sorts of ways – check out the pictures below to see what we’ve been up to!

Finding Equivalents

 in Class Four / Maths by

Class 4 have been consolidating their knowledge of fractions, decimals and percentages!

Using a range of activities, games and tasks we have been learning how to find how an amount can be written in more than three different ways!  There are always many ways to write equivalent fractions; but now we can also now find the corresponding percentage and decimal.

Cricket Enrichment Day

 in Class Four / Class Three / Class Two / PE / Sport / Whole School by

Classes 2,3 and 4 all enjoyed action packed sessions with our Cricket Coach John during Tuesday. We worked on a series of different cricket skills including running between the wickets, throwing and catching, hitting and fielding and even over arm bowling too. We then put these all together in a non stop cricket game. Look out for cricket club, starting in the summer term.

Running Success!

 in Class Four / Class Three / PE / Sport / Whole School by

**STOP PRESS** In Celebration Assembly, all our fantastic runners showed off their medals and were presented with certificates of achievement. Mrs Coker announced that our Y4 and Y3 girls won the team event for Y5 and under girls team competition and were proudly presented with their shield and certificates – many congratulations one and all!

 

Elleray Finale and Special Celebration for Running Club

 in Class Four / Class Three / PE / Sport / Whole School by

Very sadly our winter X Country running season drew to an end last Friday, but what a season it has been!

The staff have had the very best of times,  every Friday after school, running through, mud, rain, sleet, slurried fields – no end to what we got up to alongside our pupil running buddies. Poor weather was just an enhanced challenge to us!

The third and final event of the running calendar, was the grand finale X Country Championships at Windermere St. Anne’s School where, on Wednesday last week, our teams ran themselves into the history books with a 3rd place in the Yr6 Boys event, and a first place, Elleray Shield Champions, in the Girls Yr5 and Under race (with all of our participants Yr4 or Yr3), how good is that!

Aside from team performances, there were individual goals achieved and running resilience and support for team mates that could not have been bettered, we were proud to the point of being tearful.

We then all enjoyed the most fabulous celebratory run together on Friday evening, through Levens Park, finishing with hot chocolate and cakes at Mrs Mason’s Farm – what a week, what an occasion!

The last thing to say is to wish Dougal the best of luck in the National Finals at Leicester on 26th March. Good luck Dougal, we will all be thinking of you!

Running Club starts again next September, when we look forward to welcoming back our existing fellow runners, and hopefully encouraging some new running friends as well.

 

World Book Day Wonders

 in Church / Class Four / Class One / Class Three / Class Two / English by

Here are a selection of our amazing sock puppets of special book characters made to celebrate World Book Day 2022. We came together as a school to share our puppets and awarded prizes of £5 book tokens, kindly donated by FOLS.

We all loved your creativity and marveled at the many different ways you thought of to decorate your puppets. Thank you for all your hard work. 

In Assembly, Rev Bryan’s told us all about one of the most famous books in the world – The Bible. It is made up of different types of writing like poems, letters and biographies and was written by lots of different men and women. He showed us some Bibles written in different languages too – the one pictured below is in Hebrew.

After school, FOLS held a second hand book and hot chocolate stall – it was really popular and was great to see such a buzz around books with children recommending titles to each other and spotting books by authors they love – all for a bargain price! Thank you to FOLS for running this and to all who kindly donated and bought such lovely quality books which have now found new homes.

 

(Class) Four’s Fabulous Fairtrade Fortnight!

 in Class Four / Geography / Whole School by

Fair Trade: What It Is, How It Works and How You Can Help | Treading My Own Path | Less waste, less stuff, sustainable living

At Levens, we have been celebrating Fairtrade Fortnight. Through our key-stage assemblies in recent weeks, we have been learning about the FairtradeFairtrade logo and symbol, meaning, history, PNG Foundation and what it means for a product to be “Fairtrade”. We’ve found out about the conditions that workers around the world sometime have to endure to produce some of the products we take for granted, including bananas, chocolate and even footballs! However, when we buy a product that has the Fairtrade symbol on it, we know that the producer of that product has been paid fairly for the work they have done.

We also learned about the Fairtrade Premium, which is an extra pot of money which Fairtrade producers can access and spend in their communities on a variety of improvements. In class, we role-played this and put ourselves in the shoes of the Ghanaian cocoa farming community. Different groups had different ‘roles’ within the community and had to decide what to spend the money on.

We found that it was fairly easy to agree how to spend the money in a small group of people with the same job, but incredibly hard to decide when different people had different wants and needs! After debating for a long while we made our decision by democratic vote.

In grey – the decisions we made in a group of people with the same role. In orange – what we changed our mind on when debating with the class!

For our homework, we had a range of activities to choose from, all based on Fair Trade. Some of us have created comics, some posters, some art, but my favourite of all has been the three separate Fairtrade chocolate based recipes which the class has been lucky enough to enjoy! Well done to everyone who has got themselves into the spirit of Fair Trade, and a huge thanks to Pam Martin for all of her help in championing Fair Trade in our school.

Reading Buddies

 in Class Four / Class One / English by

Year 6 visited EYFS today to hear their Reception buddies read.  Reception were thrilled to have the opportunity to share books with their friends and Year 6 were incredibly positive and inspiring reading role models.