In Silver Birch (Years 3 and 4) our teachers are Miss Bowes and Mrs Costello. We are also fortunate to have Mrs Raddon supporting our learning with Miss Young supporting on a morning and Mr Eastham supporting on an afternoon.

We approach our learning through History, Geography and Science units which excite and inspire our writing focus. We have shown a fantastic, resilient attitude on our return to school this year, immersing ourselves in our initial topic of The Stone Age, exploring their achievements and lifestyle in a range of fun-filled, multisensory classroom activities. We spend time using a range of strategies to gather rich vocabulary as well as developing our understanding of grammatical concepts in English. This ensures that we produce high quality pieces of writing that are published in a variety of formats. Each day we have a guided reading session where we practice our reading skills such as inference, deduction and retrieval which really helps us to become confident independent readers. We are all really looking forward to learning about the other exciting topics that we have planned for the year.

On a morning we split into year groups. Miss Bowes teaches Year 4 and Mrs Costello teaches Year 3 in The Orchard. In Maths, we use differentiated chilli sheets to consolidate our classroom learning. This ensures that we develop the ability to reason and problem solve alongside mastering our fluency of mathematical concepts. We regularly practice our times tables, number bonds and number calculations through our daily Maths Blast sessions. These re-visit and progressively build on existing knowledge that we have learnt over the previous years.

In the afternoons we engage in our wider curriculum subjects, making links to our topic work where possible to really embed our knowledge. Through PSHCE we enjoy asking some of life’s bigger questions as well as learning about how to regulate our emotions. We especially enjoy channelling our opinions into in-depth whole class discussions during Philosophy for Children. We also particularly enjoy singing or having conversations in French as well as expressing our creativity in Art. We reflect on our spirituality through our daily collective worship, building on this in RE where we discover the importance of learning about different beliefs and religions. In Science and Computing we take an active role in our learning to make new discoveries. We also enjoy coming together to create musical masterpieces and challenging ourselves within our PE lessons. Alongside our PE lessons, we also have a weekly Forest School session where we are able to challenge ourselves, learn new skills and learn about nature.

Silver Birch are really enthusiastic about the year ahead. We are looking forward to continuing our hard work (amongst having lots of fun together) to reach our full potential!

Please click here for a copy of our welcome letter.