New!

It's been a great year, and a great year's blogging. But we got bigger. We moved on to Year 5! We've got a new blog now. You can click on this link to see it.

And of course, there's a new Year 4. And they've got a new blog too! Click this link to see it.

My fabulous minion Ice cream

One day when I came back from my swimming pool I asked my dad "can I have an Ice cream"He nodded. So I opened the fridge and saw ...  A giant banana  shaped Ice cream!I took it straight away and had a bite off it. Suddenly...I felt dizzy, fizzy and small , I took a look at myself, I was all yellow so it meant .....

    I had turned into a....

              A MINION!!!!!!

I looked more or less like:

I'm  quite glad to be a minion now, guess what I m thinking of...?

BANANAS!!!

My Amazing New Sweet

One day, I went and visited my uncle. He is my favourite uncle because he works in a chocolate factory. His job is to make exciting new sweets with personality.

Each time I visit him he gives me a new sweet. All I have to do is to try them and say what I think.

This time, he gave me a new sweet, called a Floaty Fizzer. When he put it in my hand, I thought it looked like a normal sweet. It had a dark pink wrapper with the words Floaty Fizzer on it in yellow.

I carefully unwrapped it. It still looked like an ordinary sweet. It was a pale pink rectangular bar with little holes in it that looked like bubbles.

“What does it do?” I asked.

“You just have to wait and see,” he replied.

I put it up to my nose and smelt it. It smelt like sour strawberries. Still normal.

“Taste it, and see what happens,”my uncle said.

 I bit into the bar. At first it was quite hard, but then it became soft after chewing.

It was fizzy and sweet and it tasted like fresh strawberries. On my tongue, I could feel little bubbles.

When I finished the whole bar, I felt myself lifting off the ground.

My uncle said “Quickly! Go inside before you float away!”

But it was too late. I was already in midair!

I had to hold onto the roof to avoid floating away.

“Don’t worry; it will wear off in a minute.” Said my uncle.

“It better do!” I said in a weird high-pitched voice.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you that all of the Helium in your body makes you have a weird high pitched voice that makes you sound like a duck.”

“Aaaaaah!” I said again weirdly.

1 minute later…

Eventually, I drifted back down to the ground.

“What do you think?” asked my uncle.

“I loved it! It was amazing!”

“Do you want another one?”

“NO WAY!!! It was really fun, but I was also terrified.”

What a lovely uncle.

THE END

Bug Club

This summer there are lots of online books for you to read.

Log on here with the username and password that your teacher has given you.

Desmos

In Year 4 we've been getting pretty good at using coordinates. 4G showed what they could do with them on desmos.com:

Rod

Annie

Noémie

And there's more from Marie, James, Samyak, Lucia, Aditi, Gracia, Justus, Alonso and Gabby.

You could do one at home if you like. Samyak did. Here it is:

Here's a slideshow of some of our work:

Some puppet shows

We just had time in 4G to turn our slideshows into puppet shows. We invited Year 1 and Year 2 and turned out some great performances!

Our audience seemed to really enjoy the shows. Mrs Grant tweeted:

@istlive Year 4G sharing their puppet stories with year 1 and 2. pic.twitter.com/971gK0OdRf

— Anne Grant (@avgrant31) July 1, 2015

and Miss Ash tweeted:

Fantastic Anansi puppets and story-telling from Y4 @Simon_Gregg #istlive pic.twitter.com/JtkM0N2i1E

— Estelle Ash (@estelleash) July 1, 2015

The backdrops for the slideshows and puppet shows were great too:

Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock

by Gracia, Justus, Anabel, Lucia and Noah

Flat Anansi

Rodrigo, Alonso, James and Samyak have written their own Anansi story:

Anansi and the Magic Berry

An Anansi story by Aditi, Rose and Marie:

Anansi Goes to Lunch

A story retold and illustrated by Gabrielle, Noémie, Annie and Alya.

Jumping frogs

We've been playing the game of Frogs.

The frogs can move into a space either by sliding to the next lilly pad or by jumping over the one frog next to them. You can play the game on the app below:

Full Screen and tablet version

We found the minimum number of moves necessary. We used desmos.com to make a graph of this. 

We looked at the points for 1, 2 and 3 frogs of each colour, and then estimated where the one for 4 frogs would be.

Samyak spotten a pattern in the numbers:

"You add odd numbers!"

Click on the image below to see the graph on desmos.com.

How old?

Today we remembered the time Mr Gregg asked, “There are 25 chairs and 5 tables in the classroom. How old is the teacher?”

It made Gracia ask this question to Mr Gregg:

Which came first?

In 4G we looked back at some of the big questions we'd asked before:

We picked, Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Someone...

Someone, who didn't really want to talk about it too much, or have his photo taken, has just won the singles and doubles under-eleven ping pong championship for Midi Pyrenées. You can't really see that person because of the cups he's holding in this picture.

Solitaire

We've been looking at the game of solitaire. 

You can get all different shaped boards.

Lots of us managed to get it down to just one counter left. Gabby was a bit of an expert!

Have a game online!

Aeroscopia

We had an exciting morning visiting Aeroscopia, the aviation museum near Blagnac.

The museum is a huge space filled with planes and helicopters including a Super Guppy! And there is a large collection of scale models.

For most of us, the most exciting thing was entering inside the concord and an Airbus A300B. The Concord was very long and narrow with tiny windows and a very small door, Mr. Gregg had to duck to go inside! Most of the inside space was full of machinery so we think that it was a test plane. Inside the A300B part of the floor was glass, so we could see through to the lower level where the luggage would be stored.

Here is a slide show of our fun day:

One of our activities was to sketch an MS760.

Here is a slide show of our wonderful sketches:

Towers of Hanoi

We've been investigating the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Usually this is done with disks.

But we used Cuisenaire rods.

We started with just three rods.
The aim is to move a whole pile of rods, but in a certain way. Bigger rods can never be on top of smaller ones. You can only move the top rod in the pile. You can never put a big rod on top of a small one. You can only have one pile in a circle.


The challenge was, not just to do the puzzle, but to be able to find a way to write down what we had done. We found lots of different ways:

Then we moved onto four rods:

Some of us shared our ways with the whole class.

It was interesting to look at the pattern in the minimum number of moves necessary for different sized piles of rods at the start:

Here's a slideshow:

PS The next day Rod brought in his own Towers of Hanoi:

 We also returned to that doubling series (called "powers of two" - but we don't need to remember that, do we). Some of us kept on doubling for quite a while...

And we went the other way too: halving. We halved a circle: ½  ¼  ⅛...

Anansi and the Tug of War

Here's an Anansi story:


Look how Derren Brown uses the same trick:

Three Cats Three Dogs

There are 3 cats and 3 dogs, arranged like this:


Neighbouring pairs can swap.

How many swaps to sort them?

 

We used counters to investigate.