This week, Class 4 have been amazing, I have honestly been blown away by their English work. The challenge was to write a letter to a logging company in South America to ask them to consider their role in reducing deforestation in the rainforest. The language choices and features the children have included have been brilliant – ask your child what hyperbole, direct address and modal verbs are – you will be impressed!
In Maths, the year 4’s have continued to work on multiplication and ensuring their know their times tables by heart (Information about the Multiplication Check can be found below) and the Year 5s have begun to look at fractions – realising that knowing your times tables makes everything so much quicker and easier! Please ensure you practice regularly at home using TTRockstars, Purple Mash or the many websites listed in everyone’s reading log.
I can’t believe how fast the week’s seem to be going at the moment – it will soon be Christmas!!!
This week we enjoyed an interactive, online Science session. The children enjoyed the chance to find out about sustainable materials, meet a robot, answer questions interactively and also have our question read out online.
English
This week I have been really impressed with the children’s hard work in English. Firstly we finished and evaluated some amazing diary entries and then we moved onto our new persuasive writing unit based on the book The Great Kapok Tree. We have worked hard on identifying the different features of a persuasive text – I wonder how many you can remember?
Can you identify any in the story?
I can’t wait to read our persuasive letters to the logging company trying to persuade them not to cut down the trees.
Homework – English
For homework, I would like you to play the following persuasive language game. This will help us with the language we need for our letter. As an extra challenge, choose one of the topic cards and write your own persuasive argument to agree or disagree with the statement.
Class 4 have again excelled themselves this week with more amazing work in all subjects. I have been so impressed with their diary entries based on our short film ‘The Catch’, we have continued to build our knowledge of plants in Science, worked on multiplication and division in Maths and started our work on Ancient Maya in History – I think I even learnt something in that lesson!
Last Friday afternoon, it was lovely to see the children sharing, chatting and laughing together – Let’s aim for another week of 100% attendance so we can get the board games, top trump cards and lego out again!!!
Homework – Maths
As today has been Children in Need, it only seems right to have a Children in Need inspired homework. After our escape room activity and some code breaking activities in Maths, can you crack the codes to work out the answers? (practising your multiplication and division facts at the same time!!) All sheets have been given out with reading logs.
Class 4 ended last week on a high…..We were the first class in school to get 100% attendance all week, meaning we could have an afternoon of our choice! 33 children, all in school, all week! I challenge you to do it again guys!!!!
This week, the children have again worked so hard…they have also impressed me with their team work and kindness towards each other. I received a lovely comment from another member of staff who taught them one afternoon ‘Your class have been great! I would have them anytime!’ – thanks Class 4 – you made me feel very proud!
Thanks for all the great Geography homework completed this week, the children have clearly really enjoyed all the theme work we have completed linked to the rainforests and South America. They had great fun during our end of topic challenge…playing ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’!
Homework
Next week, we will be busy writing diary entries in the role of a young boy in the rainforest using the short film below. For homework, I would like you to talk the film through with a parent, adding a first person narrative to the film. This will help us with the diary entry.
Can you note down some sentences that are going to be useful in the diary? What past tense verbs will you use? Can you think of a rhetorical question he may include? How would he be feeling? What sentence could you use in the future tense at the end of your diary?
Wow, this week has flown by…Class 4 have been so busy! Our mornings have been packed with our new English unit, reading more of Stitch Head (we had another great Twitter comment from the author!!) and gaining new learning in Maths. The afternoons have involved dissecting plants, calculating food miles, singing songs, playing football and becoming South American tour guides…we have not stopped!!!
I wonder what a Dingle Dangle is!!??!!
Learning at Home
Today, all children will come home with the times table QR codes I posted on the blog before the holiday stuck in their reading log. (Please scroll back to this previous post if you missed it) Please spend some time each week focusing on helping your child learn these skills. This week in Year 5 we have been looking at multiples and next week we will look at factors – if your child does not know their times tables, this learning immediately becomes tricky. Likewise, the Year 4s really need to make the calculations secure ready for the multiplication check.
Homework
To link to our work on food miles, I would like to set you a challenge to find out more…have a search through the food cupboard at home (ask permission first!), join mum or dad on the food shop or use a supermarket website to find out where some more foods come from. Can you then find out how many miles they have travelled to get to our plate in the UK. Finally, display your findings some how. Perhaps you could use a map, like we did, or maybe present your information in a table or in picture form. I wonder who can find the piece of food with the longest distance and the piece with the shortest. Happy searching!
Another great week for class 4 where the highlight had to be our retweets and comments on twitter from the author of Stitch Head!!!! The classroom was buzzing when we read them!
Thanks for all the great effort put into homework last week – it was great to see and hear the children sharing their work and ideas.
Thanks to everyone who attended parents evening over the last week. It was lovely to hear how lots of the children are enjoying their learning and talking about things in school at home.
I thought it might be useful to share a few resources, that I mentioned to a number of parents, with everyone so that these can be regularly accessed at home…
Timetables
Please ensure your child knows all their times tables by heart. All year 4s will take part in the Multiplication Check later in the year requiring them to answer 25 questions on the computer or a tablet.
The following QR codes lead to a range of websites which can be used to practice skills. I have also added 2dos to purple mash and every child has their TTRockstars password. There really is no reason not to practice!
Timestable Racetrack
Writing
With a number of parents, I discussed the images for our free writing on a Friday. Below is the website where I get my resources from. There are over 300 different images and story starts to choose from. You may wish to complete one weekly with your child in order to help to improve skills and apply all the work we are doing in our SPAG sessions.
Thanks to everyone who is supporting our quest to develop a love of reading at home. With some parents, we talked about the value of still occasionally reading out loud to your child. I feel this is a valuable time to spend as it allows your child to hear how a text should be read, develop further knowledge of punctuation in sentences and how to successfully use expression. We are finding this time in whole class reading very valuable and would love it if you could continue this skill at home.
Homework (optional this week)
Over half term, you may wish to complete an optional homework challenge….Can you build a rainforest in a shoe box? How will you show the different layers? What animals will live there?
If you do complete the challenge, please upload your work to seesaw or bring it into school. Happy building!
What an amazing week!!! Class 4 have worked so hard this week, from English to Geography, from Science to Maths – they have given their all. Thank you so much to all the parents who popped into school to see the classroom and books – I’m sure you will agree we are all working very hard!
Homework
For homework this week I would like to share some of our Guided Reading text ‘Stitch Head’. We are all really enjoying finding out about the weird creations that the Professor is creating – in Chapter 4 we met many more of them.
For homework I would like you to re-read the chapter and then draw or even make one of the characters. It can be made in any way you wish….perhaps you could create skull monster out of Lego or maybe you could make your own Stitch Head out of an old pair of socks. I can’t wait to see how creative you can be. Post your finished work on seesaw or bring it into school. Have fun!
Class 4 have had another fantastic week, some of the highlights include looking at food chains in Science, comparing the Amazon rainforest and Sherwood forest in Geography and starting to explore non-chronological reports in English.
We were so proud and excited on Monday when we saw that both Greenpeace and the Orangutan Land Trust had commented on our tweet!!!
We decided to use these tweets as the inspiration for our English work and create non-chronological reports about animals from the rainforest. We have spent this week finding out about the features of the text type and next week we will be busy writing our reports.
Homework
In order to write amazing reports, for homework this week, I would like you to research your chosen animal. I am happy for you to choose the animal but it MUST live in the Amazon Rainforest. Think about the question ideas we wrote in English for inspiration in your research and remember what we talked about in Computing this week and the word plagiarism!
If possible please try to make a start on your research over the weekend or at the start of next week, we will be completing some research in school but the more you know the better!
I have been so impressed with Class 4’s English work this week. We have been using the short film ‘There’s a Rang Tan in my bedroom’ and the writing we have produced has been fantastic. If you haven’t seen the film, please watch it below….it is very powerful.
We wrote a description of the lush, green rainforest and then contrasted it with a description of the awful rainforest which Rang Tan describes.
Within our writing, we have tried to include ambitious language, conjunctions, adverbial phrases, expanded noun phrases and rhetorical questions in order to build tension and impact…here are a selection of some of the amazing phrases that we collected as a class.
I’m sure you will agree they are very powerful.
Homework
Our homework this week, has an English focus. Can you complete the rainforest quick write activity in order to continue our hard work linked to writing, vocabulary and language?
Class 4 have had another great week, we have tackled tricky place value work in Maths, written descriptive paragraphs about Rang-Tan’s rainforest in English, made South American Top Trump Cards in Geography and found out more about the character Stitch head in Guided Reading.
Homework
This week our homework focus is Maths and specifically learning our times tables. Learning times tables is a life skill that just needs to be learnt.
The end of year expectation for year 4 is to know all tables up to the 12 times table. It is very important that the children learn them as towards the end of year 4 all children are required to complete the Multiplication Check. (Further information can be found below)
There are many games on purple mash (I have set a couple as 2dos) and also games on websites such as www.topmarks.co.uk, www.timestables.co.uk and www.ictgames.com. All children also have their own times table rockstars log-in in their reading logs.
The app below is also a useful free download that has a multiplication section.
