Cakes, cakes and more cakes for Comic Relief in Year 4!

What a fantastic day year 4 had on Friday raising money for comic relief!

The day started with J3 helping Mrs Marlow make crispie caked to sell in the afternoon whilst J4 set up the morning cake sale from all the cakes kindly sent in by parents. Thankyou so much for your generosity.

Half way through the cake sale J3 became the sellers and after break J4 made crispie cakes with Mrs Marlow.

We also decorated our own fairy cakes with three different colours of icing. All in all we made 300 crispie cakes and decorated 120 fairy cakes for the afternoon.

Here you can see the afternoon cake sale. Sales were slow at first but then several marketing/ selling techniques were put into place which included Miss Davies promoting a Friday night cake for the entire family - 6 cakes for 40p, Mrs Marlow playing the tambouring to round up business and many of the children taking trays of cakes out onto the yard to sell to the parents of the skiers who were waiting to depart!

We are pleased to announce that every single cake sold and the other stalls did extremely well too.

We had fun watching Miss Harwood sitting in her bath of tomatoes.... and even more fun throwing tomatoes over her!

What a great day and over £1200 raised for Comic Relief - da iawn!

Our visit to Cilfynydd to study trees and environmental art.

Here are some photos of this week's trip to Cilfynydd Water Plant.

Both classes took part in two different activities - trees as eco systems and environmental art/ Both activties were superb and we must thank the teachers Helga and Cameron for making our day so special.

We used plenty of thinking skills during the day - looking for objects around the site and working as a team to solve problems within time limits.

Why are we looking under our legs? Ask a pupil from J3 or J4!

Some of your parents may be wondering what is happening in some of these photos - why not tell them what is happening?

Wow - look at this piece of environmental art - do you know what it is?

J3 and J4 concentrated hard on their environmental art masterpieces!

We learnt plenty of information about trees and the products that we get from trees. These facts will be important when we talk about the rainforest in St Lucia.

Inside the classroom we learnt about the importance of not wasting water and how much of our earth's surface is fresh water.

Autumn Term Concept Maps

Here are some photos taken from before Christmas when our topic was "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." We were using our thinking skills to try and male links between charcters and key events in the story. It was rather tricky to link all twelve words together sensibly, but J3 and J4 did extremely well.

Practical Maths Fun - March 2011

We have been playing lots of doubling and halving games over the last few weeks to improve our doubling and halving skills.

We have enjoyed the harder challenges of doubling three digit numbers mentally.

Some children are looking pleased with their hard work!

Our favourite doubling game was "Find your partner" outside on the yard. However Mrs Marlow forgot the camera that day!

Llancaiach Fawr - The Tudors - January 2011

Here are some (belated) photos of our trip to Llancaiach Fawr in January. Everybody had a fantastic day and learnt plenty of new and interesting facts about the Tudors.

Here we are in the Apothecary.

Here we are sketching the exterior of this impressive manor house.

St Lucia Homework

Hi Year 4,

Hope you are enjoying your half term holiday. I have had a fun day watching Tangled in the cinema and am looking forward to seeing George's Marvellous Medicine later on in the week at the New Theatre, Cardiff. This week in Llancaiach Fawr there are special Crime and Punishment events in case you wanted an idea for a day out.

As we discussed on Friday, your homework for this half term is linked to the new geography based topic we will be starting next week - St Lucia. Please can you research St Lucia and find out 10 facts about it e.g. average temperature? Where is it? Capital city? Population? Language spoken? Famous for....? Famous people? these are just a few ideas. See what you can find out!

Please bring your facts written or printed out to school next week. Be creative! I liked Joe's ideas of drawing a map of St Lucia and writing the facts around it.

Enjoy your break - I'm off to see if I can book a school trip to St Lucia, but I don't think it will be possible!

Mrs Marlow

Eisteddfod 2011

Eisteddfod 2011

Eisteddfod 2011

Moodle

Dear parent(s),
We have been developing our ICT capabilities over the last few weeks with the introduction of a brand new Moodle. Moodle is known as a VLE or Virtual Learning Environment. RCT are investing heavily in the project and over 70 schools (out of 143) are developing Models . Each child in years 3,4 5 and 6, has been allocated a user name and they have all devised their own passwords. We have stressed the importance of keeping passwords safe and personal, however, we would encourage them to share passwords with parents so that you can see the merits of the VLE, and view the work that they are doing in the Moodle.
The Moodle can be easily accessed from the news blog called (latest school news) on our website http://www.pontyclunprimary.org.uk/
Advantages of using Moodle include;

• Online learning environment as a means of communication with pupils, parents and the wider community.

• Teachers can use the environment to support and enhance their classroom activities, allowing pupils to interact with learning materials and activities outside of school.

• With 14 of the 19 secondary schools being part of the RCT Moodle (including Y Pant), there has never been a better time to explore ways that Moodle can support and improve curriculum continuity from primary to secondary school.

• The Moodle is a safe environment for children which can only be accessed by invitation.

• Work can be set by teachers, uploaded by pupils, shared by pupils and even marked online whilst giving the pupil instant feedback.

• Moodle has a chat facility that can only be accessed by members of the VLE, thus providing a safe environment for your children to communicate with each other.

Since the introduction of blogs, we at Pontyclun Primary have had a direct and effective method of communicating with parents. In time we will hope to integrate our blog and Moodle but for the moment they will both run concurrently.

Mrs. Marlow and Miss. Davies