Year 3
Food, glorious food… our Science unit this term is all about food. What foods make us strong, healthy and full of energy? Year 3 had a lot of fun this week thinking about all the different food groups and just how big the portions we eat should be. This afternoon, Mika was very interested in our afternoon snacks and he wants to create a little survey to see how healthy they are. In Maths, we have been partitioning numbers (ask your child to show you), and we have begun to investigate times tables using blocks and arrays. This week we began reading a lovely story called ‘The Storm’. Each day we read a chapter and base our Literacy learning around the story. This week we have revised conjunctions, punctuating speech as well as revising writing a simple and compound sentence correctly. Everyone worked super hard this week and produced some quality learning. Well done everyone!
Year 4
We were delighted to resume school after our mid-term break and were especially pleased to welcome Ms. Nastya, our new Teacher Assistant.
This week, in English, we have enjoyed reading! Besides reading our graded reading books, we spent time reading non-fiction books about plants and animals. During this second half-term, our area of focus in Science will be ‘Living Things and Their Habitats’. To begin with, we are looking at how to group living things. We have discovered that every organism has unique characteristics, which can be used to classify all living things. We are now exploring different methods to group organisms, using Venn and Carroll diagrams.
In Maths, we continued to practise converting millilitres (ml) to litres (l) and grams (g) to kilograms (kg). It was fascinating estimating the weight of different things and then measuring the actual weight to see how accurate our estimation was. We also spent time using measuring cylinders to measure how much water our water bottles contain.
Out new theme in Topic lessons is ‘Festivals of India’. This week we learnt that many different festivals are celebrated across India, both national and religious. We discovered that India has many national symbols: the tricolour flag, the sacred Ganges River, the Bengal tiger, the graceful Indian peafowl and the lotus flower. In Art, we created our own beautiful lotus flowers out of coloured paper.
In our PSHE lesson, we learnt about the incredible power of ‘yet’. We watched a growth mindset video-clip, featuring Mojo who realised that he didn’t know how to do a Science project yet. We discovered that didn’t feel embarrassed to ask his friend, Bruce, for help. By asking for help, Mojo knew he would learn something new.
Year 5
Year 5 got back into the swing of learning this week with another busy week. In English, the focus was on poetry. We studied three interesting forms of poetry: haiku, cinquains and kennings. After learning about the structure of each type of poem, the children brainstormed ideas on their chosen themes before writing their own poems. There were some excellent results!In Maths, we tackled the tricky skill of long multiplication. We revised the written method for short multiplication first, as it is a key part of the long multiplication method. After learning the method for long multiplication, we did lots of practice questions because it is one of the trickier skills in Maths this year. Once our knowledge was secure we applied our learning to some real-life problem-solving questions. In Topic and Science, we introduced our new units of learning: Celebrations and Forces. We thought about what we already know and what we'd like to find out in the coming weeks. We also learned about the festival of Diwali, which is celebrated around this time of year. We designed our own Rangoli patterns which are a key feature of the festival each year.
