Changing States
What a productive half term it’s been for Class 4. Our writing about the fearsome beast Grendel has led us to delve in to our writer’s tool kit to use amazing adjectives, descriptive verbs and precise nouns to retell the moment the gruesome beast burst in to Beowulf’s great hall and snatched 30 of his best warriors. Our words have been chosen so carefully for effect that any reader will be able to imagine the terrifying scene we wanted to show them.
Our knowledge and use of place value is now stronger. We can use our understanding of thousands, hundreds, tens and ones it to add and subtract with greater confidence thanks to the practice we gained from using place value counters, base ten apparatus, place value charts and plenty of games. Being able to represent the value of numbers has really helped us to order and compare them as well.
In science, we have found out about the three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. We have learnt to identify and describe each state according to a set of properties that defines the structure and behaviour of its particles. We learnt a great song to help us remember this.
We have been changing the state of some materials and in the process have found out that some changes are reversible. Now we know why our bathroom mirrors have been steaming up and where the water from the puddles disappears to on a sunny day. We were amazed at being able to create our own clouds and especially enjoyed changing ice pops from a solid to a liquid - we had our own way of way of melting them, yum!!
Class 4 Autumn 1 - 2024
Being curious camels, we were keen to know if all liquids would freeze and if so whether they’d freeze at the same rate. We set up a fair test to find out. Do you know which liquids don’t freeze and which do? We were left surprised by our findings – no -one imagined that honey or oil wouldn’t completely freeze. In our investigations, we have learnt to use a thermometer to measure changes in temperature.
We have had a few special visitors to our class. They came to help us think about keeping safe. Firefighters visited not once but twice! Firstly, they taught us how to be safe in and around water and secondly they made us aware of the dangers of fire in the home. We considered pictures of a kitchen, living room and a bedroom, spotting ‘hazards’. We now know how to spot hazards, prevent fires in the home, and know what to tell our adults so they can prevent fires in the home too. You’ll be glad to hear that we also know about the dangers of electricity pylons and the importance of not playing on or around them.
A group of children have attended a ‘Chatterbooks’ group in our library, led by members of the Gateshead library team. They’ve had great fun exploring new books and authors to deepen their love of reading for pleasure. They’ve been inspired to get creatively crafty by autumn poetry, they got spooky for Halloween and even had a speed dating session with some books they’d never met before – deciding which book they wanted to spend more time with!