Hello and welcome back to Year 4W blog...Well, what have we been up to this week you ask?  Well, first off it's been another amazing week full of lots of learning.

In English, we have been having a real push on using speech marks.  You'll be pleased to know there has been huge success throughout our class.  We used this cartoon strip that our teachers prepared for us to help us remember the new speaker, new line rule.  

We then had to rewrite what was being said in each speech bubble using speech marks (`inverted commas') and all the correct punctuation. We even included synonyms for 'said' such as whispered, muttered, explained, stated and adverbials too. For example, quietly, slowly, loudly.

Still confused? This cartoon explains the rules.

So the cartoon would look like this if it was written as speech. See if you can spot the synonyms for 'said' and the adverbials used to add interest and detail.

"Using speech marks is really quite easy," Samantha said.

"Let us tell you the rules," Tom added.

"Start your speech with speech marks," Sam said confidently.

"Close your speech marks at the end of what is said," Tom explained.

"Remember though, that the punctuation goes inside the speech marks too," said Sam.

"Yes, that could be a comma, exclamation mark or question mark...for example," Tom suggested.

You can see that what the children tell us are the rules, are what we have followed for writing.  

Later in the week, we wrote an interview with the boy from Sector 7.  We imagined meeting him and asking him questions.  We were aiming to write a mixture of description and conversation.

We also wrote a book review based on Sector 7 this week and rated it out of 5.

Take a look at some of our work. Didn't we do well?!

In PSHE we have been looking again at beauty and how what is thought of as being beautiful changes depending on where in the world you might live.  The idea being that what is deemed as beautiful changes from culture to culture.  We were really mature when we considered each of these images and this made for a very interesting discussion and exchange of opinions.  We found it really interesting that some of these ideas are not that different to some of the ideas we have in Britain.

Take a look at the same images and ask yourself, 'What is beauty?'

We had another brilliant swimming lesson on Wednesday and some of us are not needing armbands now! However, we are still getting used to the 'less than warm' showers.

We were very excited to find out we are carrying on our lessons after Easter - yipee! 

Our congratulations this week go to Dominik. He was the recipient of the weekly class certificate for his effort in Maths when solving Decimal problems and explaining his answer.

Some of us have really enjoyed working on Decimals and Fractions and using them to challenge ourselves. We even wrote our own problem questions for others in our class to solve.

Well that's it for this week. We are definitely ready for the weekend now. 

Same time next week for more 4W information.