Week 1

What we've been up to this week...

What a wonderful first week back. It's been really nice to see the children again and share our adventures from the half term holidays. They have all come back to school well rested and ready for our last half term together.  

In English, we have finished our unit on playscripts, with the children practising their dialogue writing and stage direction writing skills separately at the start of the week. We used two different videos for this which really spiked the children's interest and enjoyment. Then we put all these skills together for our shared write. We used the Disney short film 'Partly Cloudy' to base our shared write playscript on and then created our own ending for the independent write. The children were really engaged in their learning and produced some wonderful pieces of work. 

In maths we continued with our time topic, this week focusing on telling time to the minute and some learning surrounding digital time - am, pm and 24 hour clocks. The children have shown great resilience as this is quite a difficult topic for some to grasp.

We have started our geography learning on megacities. The children used photographs, tables of information and maps to explore what mega cities are, which country and continent they are located in and why the population is so great. They also did some very impressive calculations where they used the population and land area (sq km) to work out the population per sq km. 

We had a fantastic time in music, where the children used untuned percussion instruments to create sounds which represented the atmosphere of a mountain. Each group then used a tuned percussion instrument to create a repeated rhythm which represented an event happening, such as snow falling or somebody climbing. 

We have started a new book in guided reading - Toto the Ninja cat - which the children are thoroughly enjoying. 

In PE, the children have been looking at throwing and catching skills with Mrs Baron, and with me, exploring some basic tennis skills. We used our hands to flip and catch bean bags to begin with, then used a tennis racket instead of our hand. We then had a go at flipping and catching the bean bags between partners, before finally using a ball! 

In our Art lesson, we were introduced to the work of Claes Oldenburg. We did some artist research and completed a quiz in our books, then reviewed and responded to some of his work.