7th February

This week was jam packed with lots of extra activities – mental health week, dance workshop and number day!

On Tuesday we were lucky enough to be part of a mental health awareness worship run by Picture News. Lots of schools joined to discuss dealing with anxiety and worries. Later on in the week we looked at the film inside out and focused on our personalities. Also on Tuesday, Stephanie joined us to lead a dance workshop for each class. We were hopping, jumping, ATL stomping and doing the running man. The children loved it and there was definitely lots of laughter. On Friday, the children loved playing a variety of card games including snap, solitaire and trumps for number day. Some children led groups and taught them how to play card games they play at home with their families. It was great fun.

Of course we still fitted in lots of other learning too! In English, we have started to build our toolkit for writing a finding tale with suspense. We began by focusing on our main characters – using relative clauses to give extra information and showing NOT telling how they are feeling. We also used power of three to create drama and empty words, short sentences and strange noise to create suspense. The writing the children produced was fabulous and I was definitely nervous after reading their suspense paragraphs. Next week we will learn how to accurately punctuate direct speech and then plan our own version of the story.

In Maths, we were multiplying and dividing by 10 – we made sure we used a place value chart and counters to help find the answers. We are working really hard with our times tables but it is so important that at home they continue to practice them too. Next week we will need them to complete harder multiplication questions.

In Computing, we have drawn our story boards to plan our group stop animations ready to film them next week. In Geography, we asked the question – where does our food come from? We sorted food into two categories – from temperate climates or from tropical climates. As our focus is tropical climates, we then found the tropical countries where some of the food was produced using an atlas. Our discussions also looked at trading and understanding what importing and exporting is. In Art, we are building up to creating a rainforest picture. This week we looked at shapes and colours of leaves and explored foregrounds and backgrounds in rainforest pictures.

Have a great weekend.