What a great week we've had! Only 1 more week until our half term break! We have got non-uniform next Friday to support those effected by the earthquakes in Turkey so we are asking for a donation and the children can come in their own clothes. 

In English this week we have continued writing our Cinquain poems all about the Winter. We spent the beginning of the week planning our poem thinking about appropriate nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs to use. We then had chance to write our own poem and some of us managed to write 3 whole verses! Each verse had 5 lines each with different rules to follow so we had to concentrate to make sure we did it correctly. We ended the week by performing our poetry in a loud, expressive voice. Some of us even managed to add some actions to make the performance more memorable and exciting for the audience

Here are some examples of the poems we have created:

In Maths this week we have enjoyed learning about Position and Direction. First, we learned what this meant and recapped on positional language such as up/down, forwards/backwards and left/right. We used our class teddy to move in different directions and followed Simon Says actions to help us remember the different vocabulary. Our favourite part was dancing to the Cha Cha Slide being able to use the language in a fun way, dancing to the lyrics! 

We then moved onto turns - looking at clockwise and anti-clockwise where we were given pictures of a character and we had to turn them a certain way to show we understood whole, half and quarter turns. 

In Encompass we have focused on our local area - Stoke-on-Trent. We discussed where it was in the UK using compass directions and discovered it was in the West Midlands. We located it on a map of the UK and linked last week’s learning, looking at whether it was urban or rural. After thinking about the population and the amount of buildings we decided it must be urban. We enjoyed looking at the human and physical features of Stoke-on-Trent including the River Trent, Potteries Museum and Bet 365 Stadium. 

In Science, we looked at how important exercise is for humans. We discussed different ways to exercise before predicting which actions would or would not raise our heart rates. After making our predictions, we then carried out an investigation, looking at how our heart rate changes after doing exercise. During the lesson we learned that exercise helps our muscles remain strong, makes us more flexible, helps our vital organs (lungs and heart) and keeps us at a healthy weight.