Hi everyone, what a busy week we've had! As well as our usual learning we also had the joy of inviting parents in for consultations, thank you to all those who attended. It was great fun showing you all the progress your children have made, there's so much to cram into 10 minutes so thank you to everyone for being so patient when some appointments ran over, it was greatly appreciated!
In English we have been looking at the features of a third person narrative recount ready for our extended write, a heavy focus this week has been on the vocabulary we can use to describe different aspects of our writing, something of particular note is how the character Willie sees things very differently to other characters and his vocabulary is a lot darker than what we are used to, imagine describing a dog! Fluffy, playful, panting, positive words, however due to Willie we have been seeing vocab such as, flesh-tearing, savage, poisonous and many more, the children have really gotten into this! We have also been magpieing our new genre and this has provided a lot of ideas on how we should structure our writing to make the most out of each paragraph, really focusing on our attention to detail.
Our maths learning this week has seen us continue our work relating to multiplication. To begin with we multiplied 4-digit numbers by 1-digit, which was relatively simple for the children, however the difficulty increased the next day with 4-digit by 2-digit multiplication, this required us all to look at the skills and methods required to do this and everyone worked extremely hard supporting each other. We investigated methods relating to multiplication of four digit numbers by one and two digits. To finish the week we moved onto solving complex problems that involved multiple steps and skills, as mentioned in consultations, the vocab used in this questions is just as important as the numbers to determine what the question is actually telling you to do such as the words 'damaged and broken' implying a subtraction has taken place.
Our Science learning this week saw us investigate the planets of the solar system. We discussed each planet, its size, distance from the Sun, length of day and length of year this led to us creating a fact file on a planet of our choice, afterwards we had a go at creating a mnemonic to help us remember the order of the planets, one that I used to use as a child was "My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets" but then poor Pluto got demoted to a dwarf planet so that no longer works. Ask your children what mnemonic they came up with, some were very humourous!
Our History learning saw us continue our work relating to early Islamic civilisations. We moved on to the development and building of the ancient city of Baghdad. We learnt that the caliph - Al-Mansoor, wanted to build a city the greatest city there ever was, a round city. To achieve this he consulted his architects and astrologers, who came together to tell him the perfect time to begin building We role-played the events and acted out each part of the process paying attention to how the people would have felt and why he wanted to know the perfect time.
Our Geography lesson saw us begin to investigate rainforests around the World. We learnt about the different layers and the animals that can be discovered at every level. We then used that knowledge to complete some reading, music and art activities. Next week we will be looking at them in more detail and already the children are very excited for this topic.