Hello again and welcome to this week's Year 4 blog.

In English, we are still enjoying working on the book 'The Day the Crayons Quit' from last week. This week, we have been writing letters to and from the crayons. We 'invented' a new crayon character to join the story who wrote to Duncan (the boy the crayons belong to) and then pretended to be Duncan and wrote his reply back to them.

Our teachers wanted us to use more of a `formal' tone in our writing for the reply. We have been learning that we need to use different tones depending on the type of letter we are writing. For example, when you write to a friend, your style of writing would probably sound quite chatty, almost like you were talking to them. However, if you were writing a letter of complaint or to apply for a job you would need to use different language or `tone'.  We wanted Duncan to be more formal in the way he wrote his reply to the crayon.  Here are some of our letters to illustrate the different 'tones' of a letter.

Maths has been great!  We have been looking at time...no, not clock-watching!  In Maths we have had a great TIME! Yes literally, as we are now looking at learning all about time. We have been learning to read the time using a 'traditional' analogue clock and we discovered that we can use a clock to help practise our 5 times tables! We have learned a nifty way to use our fractions to draw our own pretty accurate analogue clock.

We have worked on o'clock, half past, quarter to and quarter past. We have even been counting in 12s (months of the year), 7s (days of the week), 24s (hours in a day) and even 60s! (seconds and minutes) and converting from one unit of time to another - phew!

Then, just as we were getting pleased with ourselves, we were shown the digital clock!! Tricky or what?!  Our teachers didn't seemed phased though (that is to say there was no greying or loss of hair).  Anyway, our teachers told us that it is typical for children to face this and not to give up we will get it in TIME (see what we did there?).

Snappy Maths also made an appearance again this week to help us with our maths. Feel free to have a go too...

On Wednesday, we welcomed a visitor into class from the Healthy Schools Team to talk to us about privacy and personal space. It was a great afternoon spent learning about this and considering possible solutions for potential dilemmas. We demonstrated a mature attitude to the tasks our visitor set us and made our teachers very proud.

Have a little peek at us in action in the pictures below...

Finally, this week's congratulations go to Aaron for receiving the class certificate. And the reason? He has made an amazing (and sudden) improvement in his handwriting this week. It was so fabulous we had to make sure one of the grown ups in class hadn't written it! Well done, Aaron, keep it up.

Drop in next week to find out more about us.