YEAR 3
How excited the students were this week to see their little sprouts growing into stems and leaves!! This week, our planting station is positively blooming, as well as our curiosity towards how plants grow, and how to plant…students took time to choose their best sprouting seed and replant it into soil. Now that more attention is drawn to watching for the changes in their sprouts, many are even remarking on the changes happening in the play yard, as the trees are beginning to blossom and leaves are emerging…Spring is a wonderful time to observe.
As our observation skills are put to good use, so too, is our partner work: excellent language skills are being heard and expressed as students work together to explain various plant parts, and plant facts. Year 3 is making good use of guided reading time with interesting segments of information about roots, stems, and leaves. Math is also being used to ensure only ½ of a cup is filled with soil, rather than a full, as well as measuring water rations for new seedlings. We are quickly learning how much planning it takes to make a garden, and how much dedication it takes to keep watering and eagerly watching for any little change in our seeds.
Well done Year 3: continue the rewarding toil!
YEAR 4
In English, we carried out our ‘Big Write’ to show case all of our learning from ‘The Shang Dynasty’ non-fiction unit. We planned and drafted a non-chronological report answering the question: ‘Did the Shang Dynasty really exist?’ We typed our final version of our report on the school laptops, which will go up on display in the classroom. The children used the internet to find diagrams, photos and pictures to supplement their compositions.
In Math, we have been revising the different mental and long written strategies, which help us for multiply 2 and 3-digit numbers by 1-digit numbers including numbers in decimal notation. We have revised the long multiplication using traditional, ladder and grid methods. We have learnt the mental methods of ‘partitioning’, ‘doubling’, ‘rounding’ and ‘halving and then multiplying by 10’.
In Topic this week, we have continued our ‘River and water unit’. We delved deeper into our learning our river features and developed a whole class story using the tricky vocabulary words to describe the journey of a river from the source to the mouth.
In Science this week we continued our ‘Grouping Living Things’ unit. We learnt how to classify animals using a using a ‘Classification Key’. We classified animals based on their physical characteristics.
YEAR 5
As I write, the sun is shining, the birds are singing furiously and our temperatures are rising very slowly. Despite being an inclement week it hasn’t dampened the fun for Year 5 both in and out of the classroom. First thing on Monday morning, we were thrilled to find our Petunias and Gladioli had all sprouted brilliantly and the children really enjoy coming into class each morning to water their plants and bestow lots of love upon them to make them grow stronger!
We also enjoyed having Ms Hitchcocks in class with us during one of our English lessons on Monday morning where she was able to observe us applying our skimming and scanning skills to read quickly and efficiently to obtain key pieces of information from our text. As we are all really enjoying learning about different explorers and the places they have discovered, we are attempting to transform parts of our classroom into extreme environments.
Year 5 have continued to work diligently in the other areas of the curriculum for example on place value for decimal numbers, looking more closely at complete and
incomplete metamorphoses as well as continuing to read and enjoy ‘Charlotte’s Web’ as we await the fate of Wilbur the pig! We will be ending old units of work this week in Topic and PSHE and starting with fresh topics after this coming long weekend.
YEAR 6
We have had a wonderful week here in Year 6. We have been working hard on Maths and learning how to write summaries in English. We have been working very hard to try and finish our big WWII project. It has been a lot of work this week, but we have persevered and done really well, Mr. Marsh has told us that we have been doing a great job!
