Week Beginning 9.10.17

As we speed towards half term Seahorse class have moved into top gear with their learning as we have been solving problems, experimenting and getting creative with our writing. 

English

In English this week, we have been having lots of fun as we take on the role of dragon hunters. We have been designing our own dragons as we researched ideas, held brainstorming sessions and did lots of role play as dragon trainers. We have 'boxed-up our ideas' and we are ready for our big write next week: creating a whole information report using paragraphs, interesting sentence starts, conjunctions and lots of imaginative ideas. 

Maths 

The past couple of weeks have been all about addition and subtraction as we have sharpened our skills by mentally taking away 1, 2 and 3-digit numbers from hundreds numbers. We have been counting on and back and using our knowledge of partitioning. We have learnt a new written method for adding called the column method and we just love how we can quickly calculate with larger numbers. 

Science 

We have been experimenting with magnets in science, testing the strength of a magnetic force and discovering whether shape or size make a difference to the strength. Ask us about our results. 

Music 

was very exciting this week as we got our violas out for the first time this year and learnt how to hold them correctly in the rest and playing position. 

Art 

In art we have been learning all about colour theory and mixing. We have looked at the colour wheel in detail and experimented with tint and shade. 

In other news...

There is a FOSA AGM Thursday 19th October at 6.00pm at the school. If you would like to get more involved with parent parent fundraising and school events such as the Christmas and Summer fetes and school discos then pop along. 

Week Beginning 25.09.17

It's been a week of investigation and discovery this week at Necton Primary School.

Maths

It's been Inspirational Maths Week this week and we have all been enjoying a week of games and problem solving activities focusing on making mistakes, persevering and making our brains grow!

We started the week by looking at emoji data and thinking of different ways to sort and organise information. We also looked at shape properties and ordered data sticking to a set of rules working together as we went.

Also, we have been finding all possibilities, as we looked at different ways of counting and building different shapes. We discovered that we all approach problems in different ways and we all visualise maths differently; there are many ways to solve a problem! 

It was really tricky working with others sometimes and explaining our understanding as we made 2D and 3D shapes with string in groups of four; explaining our ideas and describing our understanding. 

Ending a week with a game of finding the total, we discovered that we must make mistakes to learn and improve our understanding and develop strategies. We realised that it's great when we get things wrong and make mistakes because that is how we learn. 

English

We memorised an entire story this week! We can even tell it to you without looking at any words. Ask us about 'Mokey See, Monkey Do!', we can now tell you a funny story off by heart! We then developed our writing skills by looking at sentence structures and retelling it in the most interesting way possible. Most importantly, we revisted our work to improve and edit it, to make it the best we possibly could. 

Topic

We are getting more and more confident with out atlas skills, as we located some of the important rivers and seas in and around the U.K. We also learnt how to read ordinance survey maps; recognising symbols and features that tell us more about our local area. 

Science 

Continuing our investigations we looked at how different surfaces affected the force of friction. 

We also conducted an experiment investigating reducing friction using: oil, bananas and chopsticks. Ask us about it. Can we explain the results?

In other news...

As the harvest season is upon us, we looked at the word harvest and tried to find as many words as we could using just the letters in the word harvest. We came up with 53! We thought about the different words which are related to the season such as SHARE and CARE and adapted a poem to perform in the church. We hope you can all make it first thing  Wednesday 4th of October to watch our class performance and celebrate the season at the local church with Rev. Thorpe.   

22/09/16

Well, what an exciting first few weeks! In Seahorse class we are settling in nicely and getting stuck into this terms topics and units, as we step up our skills to the Key Stage 2 Curriculum. We have also enjoyed playing in the playground with our brand new playground apparatus. 

English

There are strange happenings in the Seahorse classroom already with the arrival of a mysterious tiny doorway...We have been thinking who or what could live in such a tiny living space. The mystery deepened as trails of half eaten strawberries and cornflakes appeared all over the classroom leading up to the door. One morning, we came in to see the paint cupboard in a mess, with tiny footprints all over the floors and walls! We used our imaginations and considered that possibly a classroom fairy or goblin could be the culprit!

We decide to write a set of instructions about how to trap the pesky critter just in case! We played barrier games to identify the useful language needed when giving instructions and have done lots of work on imperative verbs, prepositions, adjectives and conjunctions to help explain. 

We looked at lots of examples of different types of instructions to identify the language features and the layout. We then wrote a full set of instructions; complete with an engaging introduction, equipment list and carefully worded numbered steps to follow. We even included a top tip or warning. 

Check the bog soon to see some finished examples of our fantastic work or pop in to see our display. 

Geography

As part of our theme 'Fantasy and Adventure' we have been helping Uncle Travelling Matt plan a trip around the U.K. We have been learning how to use an Atlas to locate some of the main cities in our country and learn about the countries that make up the U.K. We have also been looking into the origin of local place names with the help of Google Maps on the computers.  

Maths 

In our maths lessons, we have been looking at place value. we have increased our knowledge of the number system to 4 and sometimes even 5 digit numbers as we identified the value of each digit, represented numbers in different ways, partitioned them, added and subtracted 10 or 100 and compared and ordered.We now feel confident with our skills to move onto new unit of addition and subtraction. 

Science 

Our topic this term in science is forces and magnets. We have been observing three of the main forces in action: push, pull and twist. We learnt that the direction of a force can be shown by and arrow and that forces can be increased or decreased. We made paper planes and observed the forces at work. We then super-charged them with elastic bands to increase the force released at once and in our diagrams we learnt how to show a greater force with a larger arrow. It was really fun shooting the planes!

Art 

We have been thinking about forces again with our artwork as we use the materials of Brusho (a water stain) and oil pastels. We saw how the paper absorbs the inks and is repelled by the oil based pastels. We used these to work in the style of the artist Patrick Caulfield to produce bright bold pictures observing simple linear aspects. Again, pictures to follow!

In other news...

We have been thinking about Harvest and what it means to us. We tried to see how many words you can make from the word harvest and used them to adapt a poem about the season. We look forward to seeing as many family members in the church, in a couple of weeks time, to perform our group reading to you all. 

Finally, it was a very exiting day today as we held our whole school elections. We look forward to seeing democracy in action with our new Year 6 heads of the School Council and the Eco-council leading the way. A massive congratulations to the winners of the representatives for the Seahorse class.