Week beginning 25.04.16

This weeks blog is bought to you by Bethanie and Annabel

Maths

In maths this week, we have been working on compass points and coordinates. We have been using compass points to write instructions to find an object. Then we used a grid to lead the monkey to the banana but there were dangers in the way! Even though we had dangers we managed to get to the banana. by giving clear instructions using the compass points. We created our own maps and followed directions to create mystery pictures. 

Literacy    

In literacy this week, we have been writing and introduction and appearance paragraphs for our information texts about our chosen rainforest animals. We have also been using generalisers to make our writing more interesting. We have also been using connective devices  to  add details to sentences and explain why our animals have such special features. 

Science

In science this week we have been creating our very own experiments with cress seeds. For example, we put cress seeds into a plastic cup and  took something away from the seeds to see if they still grow. We are testing taking away water, soil, nutrients or sunlight but we made sure we had a fair test to measure it against. We even took away everything except sunlight and had just seeds! We predicted what would happen and we are very interested to see the results. 

Art

In art this week we have been painting with sponges to make a rainforest background. We though about how the rainforest had different layers such as the emergent layer, the canopy, the under-story and the forest floor and mixed different colours to match the amount of light the different forest layers would get. For the next few lessons we will be working on this picture as we build up different layers using different materials. Miss Palmer made a demonstration and some of our ones looked just like it!

In other news...

We have really enjoyed our first week of doing our daily mile and some of use can now even run for the whole fifteen minutes but all of us can feel ourselves getting fitter and improving every day. 

Also well done this week for Abria  for achieving her 10m swimming certificate and Hugo for being awarded wonderful work for his dedication and hard work in maths. 



   

Week beginning 18.04.16

This weeks blog is by Bethanie and Courtney

Maths

In maths this week we have been we have been working on our times table and division facts. We have been playing lots of games to practise doubling and halving and using 100 squares to play games that revise our times tables and divisions. We also have been looking at multiplication calculations and looking for tricks and patterns. We are also getting confident at multiplying double digit numbers by partitioning.

Literacy

This week we have started looking at information texts. We have discussing the layout and the purpose of each feature. We have been writing questions in our literacy books about our chosen rainforest animal. We have been researching different rainforest animals for our own class information book, using the iPads. We have also been using dictionaries to look up subject specific vocabulary. Miss Palmer gave us some tricky and interesting words to look up and we had a challenge to use them in our questions. 

Science

 In science this week we have been looking at plants and growing our own sunflowers. We thought about what it means to be alive and discussed all the things a plants needs to thrive. We have started to design our own experiments to investigate what happens if you take away any of these things. 

Art

We have been studying the artist Oenone Hammersley, a contempary artist who uses vivid colours to bring rainforest animals alive using water colours and other materials. We have been practising our sketching techniques and water colour skills in preparation for working in response to her art. 

In other news...

Well done to Finn this week for receiving his Read to Succeed certificate and Lewis who has gained enough reading stamps to be invited to the tea party. Keep up the good work 3P!

Remember to bring your trainers next week as we start our new healthy activity 'The Daily Mile'. 

    

Week beginning 11.04.16

This weeks blog is written by Ella Lucia and Mia.

Literacy

We have been using our imagination to describe a peacock by writing metaphors. We turned these ideas into a repeating phrase poem. We looked at MP3s of peacocks pictures and real feathers for inspiration. Look out on next week's blog, when we combine our literacy and artwork and see some examples of our finished work. 

Spellings

Our current spelling focus is the suffix 'ure' and homophones. A homophone is a pair of words (or sometimes three or even four words) that sound the same but are spelt differently and different meanings. How many can you think of?

Geography

In topic, we have been learning about out new subject; the Rainforest. We were amazed to learn about the fish swimming around the trees when the Amazon river bursts its banks. We used atlases and globes to locate where in the world the rainforests are and also learnt about the weather at the equator. 

Maths

In maths, we have been revisiting place value. Marking numbers on empty number lines and adding and subtraction amounts of money using our knowledge of place value. 

Science 

We looked closely at some plants and named the main the part of a flowering plants and thought about what their function in the plant is. 

In other news...
A big well done to all the brave pupils that entered and help present the talent contest this week. Especially Bethanie from year 3 for winning first place, with her brother and sister rendition of Oliver.