Welcome To Year 4

Please also see our school Twitter page @Stmichaelswales or our class Seesaw account for further information and updates. 

Our Class Learning Journey

SPORTS DAY 2024 (Part 1)

Location: Leckwith

Events: Sprint, Relay, Obstacle

What an awesome event at Leckwith track to celebrate our 2024 Sports Day! Firstly, a massive thank you to all of the parents and family members that made the trip to come and support! 

Firstly, the teams!

Ty Coch!

Ty Glas!

Ty Gwyrdd!

Ty Melyn!

Here are some of the action-packed events that took place today!

Here are the results!

Currently in...

1st Ty Gwyrdd 384 points

2nd Ty Glas 382 points

3rd Ty Coch 374 points

4th Ty Melyn 322 points

We will see how our field events go tomorrow to see how the results change!

After Half Term...

3rd June - 14th June

What a busy couple of weeks it's been! From being visited by Ian Brown telling us all about his pet tortoise being the inspiration for his books and how we can be anything we want to be! Ian had always wanted to be an author, but only became one in his 40s! So, there's always time for what you want to do!

During our Literacy sessions, our group (which is mainly Year 4s) were creating our own persuasive adverts. As you can see, the inspiration and creativity was in full attendance and we created some amazing work which included soap in so many variants that Dragon's Den will have its work cut out! On the bonus side, it stops us from being stinky too! 

In our Topic, we are focusing on how to create the best designs to battle 

G R A V I T Y

and

A I R  R E S I S T A N C E 

by competing in the EGGSTRONAUT CHALLENGE!

The teams, that were created *randomly* consist of 4 members each. Their mission is to get their Egg Astronaut (Eggstronaut) safely back to Earth! BUT, they only have a finite amount of resources to complete the mission. The egg will be dropped from 3m in their created crafts. So, this week, we took some inspiration from Mark Rober - who is a really good YouTube Science Guy who conducted similar tests. We got some inspiration and in our teams, created our designs! Check them out!

We will be building and testing next week, so which team do you think will win?

During our skills Friday swap, we finally got our hands on MICROBITS! These awesome tools bring our digital work to the physical as we can program them to do so many things! We focused on learning about the technology, using block coding to establish our ideas and then tested! We had so much fun doing it, only annoying thing was running out of time! 

Lastly, we got our arts and crafts skills on FIRE by creating our Father's Day cards. This year, we took on a new style, for something cute and memorable as we had to draw around our own hands! 

Check out our process and what the finished design looked like too!

Trip to

Techniquest!

Friday 10th May 2024

What an awesome day we had as Progression Step 3 went to Techniquest!

We were given strict instructions of:

1. No running on the exhibit floor.

2. No food or drink on the exhibit floor.

3. Have FUN!

and we certainly did that!

We loved the exhibition floor, checking out the different challenges and investigations, interactions and science in action!

From static electricity, to space rockets, multi-coloured shadows, building towers, the hurricane machine, maths challenges, the huge ant colony and other problem-solving challenges! We had a really fun, interesting time!

We loved the Science Show with Tom where we focused on Extreme Earth! We loved the live experiments we did as well as the interactive quiz!

Check out some of the awesome videos below!

This week has been immense! To begin the week we had this year's Wales Rocks tournament on TTRS (Times Tables Rockstars). It's a special tournament where only schools in Wales can take part. This year was bigger than ever with over 200 schools taking part. This resulted in:

• 1,087 individual classes
• 15, 818 students taking part

This year, a whopping 11, 517, 264 questions had been answered correctly! 

The Results:

As a school, St. Michael's finished in 53rd place!

As a class, Year 4 finished in 141st place!

                Year 5 finished in 170th place!

                Year 6 finished in 176th place!

                Year 3 finished in 393rd place!

A massive well done to all that took part, and we can come back bigger and stronger next year!

In our Topic, we started investigating gravity and what effect it has on us! We tested it and began to understand the difference between mass and weight! Check out our slow-mo videos below showing our investigation in action!

As always, we demonstrated amazing values and understanding this week, with really deserving winners for Golden Rules, Jesuit, Welsh and our Class Dojo!

What a lovely way to share our collective worship today! A huge thank you to the parents and families that joined us for our time today. We focused on the trials of Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane. We all have our own challenges and hurdles to overcome and we can learn so much from Jesus at this time.

We read through the story and also focused on a lovely poem that you can listen to underneath this!

#Faith #Action #Success

Holy moly, what a busy time we've had! There's so much to catch up on!

Firstly, after the half term break, we came back ready to go and we loved having our Egyptian Workshops with Luke from the Egypt Centre in Swansea. He showed us lots of artefacts from that time period including the Ancient Egyptian pillow, the material they used for knives and even what they used as makeup... which we now know is poisonous... 

We also absolutely thrived during our Eisteddfod this year, celebrating our Patron Saint St. David, but also celebrating our culture and our amazing talents! 

The competition was so close and I am so pleased that I wasn't one of the judges because that must have been such a difficult job! 

In such a close game, the results were...

1. Ty Coch - 181 points

2. Ty Glas - 177 points

3. Ty Melyn - 167 points

4. Ty Gwyrdd - 160 points

Well done to everyone and we already can't wait for next year and seeing what the teams will bring!

On 7th March, we celebrated World Book Day and focusing on characters in Traditional Fairytales! Firstly, our costumes were AMAZING! The effort put in, is truly amazing! I had such a tough time deciding who was going to win "Best Costume" with so many choices!

Then, during our Science Week, we were lucky enough to go to University of South Wales (USW) for a sports morning, lead by students. We focused on our Football skills including dribbling, passing, shooting and even had matches! The sportsmanship on show was excellent to see and we had so much fun!

What a BONKERS week we've had!

In the middle of our tests (which everyone has done super well on!), we had our amazing Rockstar Day with our amazing costumes and our super competition results! It was really enjoyable and we all made a fantastic effort! Thank you to the parents and guardians that helped make our awesome outfits!

In our Egyptian topics, we have sculpted our fantastic Canopic jars and created a script in our morning session! The models we have created are INCREDIBLE! 

The jars are:

Hapi/Hapy - Baboon - Protected the Lungs

Imesty - Human - Protected the Liver

Duamutef - Jackal - Protected the Stomach

Qebhsenuef - Falcon - Protected the Intestines

We have also been celebrating lots of events this week including Internet Safety Day, Well-being Week and even had a visit from Dougie!

We have working super hard and it shows! A well-deserved break coming up for us to get ready for Eisteddfod!

What a hilarious and action-packed week!

As the test weeks began, we did really well focusing on our GL tests this week. We also celebrated our Author Day by having Claire Donald join our school to read her book, "Mother Earth is Weeping" which you can listen to a little snippet below!

It was really informative and interesting and certainly gives a lot to think about!

In our Science, we have been learning about the Digestive System, so this week, we saw it in action! Well... sort of!

Using a bag with some orange juice to represent our stomach, we put our breakfast of some yummy Wheetabix into our bag with a little bit of water, representing our saliva and gave it a good mix!

Using tights, we put our partially digested food into the tights that represented our intestines to get all of the nourishment from the food! When the food has passed through, it was needed to be... evacuated!

Using two cups to represent... you know what! 

We had so much fun and so many amazing photos!

Finally, for our certificate winners, we had 2 Golden Rules winners this week, which shows just how hard we've been working!

Wow! What a busy couple of weeks back in to school as we embark on the new year!

We had so much fun challenging each other in our Maths multiplication games, celebrating our successes for those in our Golden Rules and Jesuit certificate winners as well as meeting a brand new friend!

After half-term, St. Michael's will have a Dog called Dougie joining us on Thursdays! Now, Dougie isn't here to just look cute - he's actually working! He will be helping children with their reading, helping us talk through our feelings as well as other jobs around the school.

In our new topic all about the Ancient Egyptians, we have looked at the Gods they worshipped and the practices they used to prepare for the afterlife! To experience this, we did a Now>Press>Play session where we were chosen to help the Pharaoh into the afterlife and we met some... interesting people along the way! 

Lastly, we had a really eventful day of having a new classroom for the morning when ours needed to warm up from the freezing temperatures! It certainly made our classroom louder... who would have guessed that was possible?!

 What a super busy couple of weeks we've had! 

From getting to meet a real-life author in J.J Arcanjo - creator of Crookhaven - a special school for those good thieves! We were also fortunate enough to go and see the excellent Pontypridd Theatre Production of Beauty & the Beast in the theatre alongside 2 other schools. We had so much fun and really enjoyed the whole experience!

We have also been working super hard on our OWN Christmas Concert - SCROOGE! We have loved every moment of it, we looked fantastic in our costumes too and, best of all, the parents loved it too!

So firstly, well done to the children in Years 4, 5 and 6 

A massive thank you to Mr Davies and Mr Williams for your help in getting our production ready to go!

Finally, thank you so much to all of the family members that came to see us perform and support each other! It means so much and I know how much the children appreciate it too!

Lastly, we have been focusing on our instructional writing to end the term! Making sure our imperative verbs are telling people what to do, and that our instructions are super specific (as Mr Payne was being super pedantic *shock*) and we were able to create our sandwiches!

Well done everyone! 4 days to go 'til the Christmas holidays!

Science Week 1: Chemistry 

This week we focused on the first of our 3 Science Weeks: Chemistry! We prioritised the learning of SOLIDS, LiQuIdS and G A S E S!

We focused on the main properties of them, what makes things fall into one of these categories and spoke about the 4th state: Plasma!

Check out some of our videos below from Dr. Mendes and Dr. Roberts explaining the differences between them and what we know. 

We also looked at changing state, how materials change from one category to another, especially when looking at the Water Cycle, which doesn't exist without the sun!

We also looked at Chromatography and how absorbing water with filter paper allows colours to be dispersed and show how certain colours are more soluble than others! We made some awesome designs as a result!

As always, we had some very deserving winners of our Golden Rules, Jesuit and our Class Dojo certificates!

What a fun-filled couple of weeks it's been!

Firstly, we welcome Miss Page to our class. She is a student teacher completing her final year of qualifications and we are thrilled to have her as part of our St. Michael's Family

We have been working so hard on our tasks for the last few weeks including our Diary Entries, Missions and tasks in our ICT and Science too. You'll see above our winners for our Starbooks challenges where they have read 10 books and earned a prize for doing so! Then, congratulations too, for our FIRST winner of reading 30 books! This called for a bigger prize!

We've also been focusing on the events of The Great War as part of our learning about Remembrance Day. As part of this, our Italian sessions have focused on the Soldati (Soldiers) and how it is recognised in Italy. Check out our video below!

Keep up the amazing work!

Looking forward to practising our Christmas Concert and Science Week next week!

What a crazy couple of weeks!

We had an absolute blast with Larry, the Songwriting Doctor as we made our class song (which you can listen to underneath), used apps like Garageband to create awesome tracks, and played the Ukuleles!

We have been working really hard during our ICT sessions where we are focusing on Scratch and making a collection game! So far, we have made our sprites move, added our soundtracks and even made another sprite move when we collect it! Next time, we will look at adding our points score and a timer too!

Finally, here are some of our Jesuit & Golden Rules winners over the weeks! We have shown excellent attitudes, behaviours and mindsets in our work and around the school!

What an amazing day we had walking to Pontypridd to celebrate and learn more about our community, as part of our topic for this term!

It's safe to say the weather wasn't on our side the entire time! 

Despite that, everyone was thoroughly enjoying the day, showing amazing attitudes and positive mindsets!

We enjoyed tasks in Ynysangharad Park following the story of the Mabanogion, sessions in the museum seeing how Pontypridd became what it is today and sessions in the museum looking at old records of our areas including the dreaded Punishment Book for naughty children!

A massive thank you to all involved and most importantly, a massive well done and thank you to all of the members of Year 4, 5 and 6! You were a great credit to our school! 

We loved this week focusing on finding our feet in our new year, showing our personalities and demonstrating our capabilities! In our Orienteering sessions, we focused on map reading, working together and solving challenges! 

Welcome to the New School Year!

Time for Year 4!

Firstly, a welcome to you all and I look forward to posting all of the wonderful things we'll get up to!