Summer Term

We have been learning our Roman Numerals to 10 using a fantastic song! It helped us to think about the other numerals that we could work out using what we knew to help us. 

In History this week, we took part in a reconstruction relay and imagined we had travelled to 1922 with Howard Carter to discover Tutankhamun's Tomb. We had to discover some very interesting artefacts with our team and then found out some incredible facts about Howard Carter. Did you know that it took his team six years to find the tomb and then 8 years to remove all of the artefacts?

Our focus this half term has been 'festival feasts' and we have created a community paint to showcase our interpretations of some of our favourite foods. Originally, we thought that it would be a problem that our paints ran on cloth but after being creative, determined and inventive we realised that we actually loved it! 

Today, we worked as experts and team teachers to help each other get better at our four operations. Working together is an excellent way to revisit our learning and we make sure our learning is sticky by explaining it to somebody else. 

We have been cooking and tasting dough that was made using only 2 ingredients! We used 1 cup of Greek yoghurt and 1 and 1/3 cups of self-raising flour to make a simple dough. We have been thinking about how easy it is to create fresh dishes using simple ingredients. 

In History, we have started our Ancient Egypt topic. To start of the unit, we used familiar pictures of Ancient Egypt to think about what we already know about the period in History. Unsurprisingly, lots of us already knew lots of the gory stuff about mummies, pyramids and Pharaohs!

After that, we took part in an information run. We worked in teams to find facts around the room, remember them and bring them back to our teams before the time ran out. 

In English, we have started learning about folk tales. Our first folk tale is the Brer Fox and the Brer Rabbit go Hunting. In the tale, the Brer Rabbit tricks the Brer Fox into thinking he's dead so he can steal his bag of game! In today's lesson, we acted out the story to help us remember. 

In Art, we are thinking about food! We have been looking at different artists who display art through drawing, painting and sculpture and are working towards our 'Community Paint' where we'll walk together to create a whole class painting of a summer picnic. 

In PE today we were trying to find different cards with actions on. There were 12 cards to find with actions like 10 star jumps, 10 pencil jumps, 5 deep breaths and run on the spot for 30 seconds. When we had found all of the control cards, we came back together to have a go at drawing a birds-eye map our school and label the area where we found them. 

We felt like experts in French today whilst learning the names of different colours. We already knew bleu (blue), rouge (red), vert (green), jaune (yellow) and violet (purple) because our tables are named after French colours so spent the rest of the lesson mastering the pronunciation and learning some extra colours like marron noir (black), gris (gray), rose (pink), (brown) and orange (orange.)

In RE, we have been thinking about the ten commandments. After learning about the rules that Christians follow, we spent a lesson thinking about the rules that other religions follow and have been learning about Sikh rules for living. 

In Art, we have continued taking inspiration from Marcus Coates and have been creating nests. Today, we created nests using parts of nature as our printing and painting tools. We thought about how important it was to be determined and inventive when using such different tools!

In Geography, we have been learning about regions around the world. In today's lesson, we thought about the regions in South America. After learning that most of South America is in an equatorial region, we thought about somewhere in South America we knew about and decided to research the Amazon Rainforest. 

As a class, we took part in a debate to decide whether we should conserve the trees in the rainforest or we should plant new ones. 

"We should plant more trees because planting more trees will make habitats for prey and keep them safe from predators. Also, if we plant more trees we can start recycling to save the money we would spend on planting them." - Iris 

We have been working across the curriculum to test Data Loggers! We used a data logger to test the sound in each classroom to try and answer the question 'which room in school is the loudest?'. We each made predictions, thought about how we could make our experiment a fair test, decided on variables and then evaluated our tests through reading the graphs that the data loggers made. 

In English, we have been learning about the structure of play scripts. We learnt that most scripts contain a cast list, setting description, stage directions and lots of descriptive words to tell the actors what they should be doing on the stage. To test our toolkit, we practiced performing chapter 5 of The Firework Maker's Daughter as a script. Can you spot Razvani, Lila, the ghosts and the Fire Imps?

After learning our body parts in French using 'head, shoulders, knees and toes', we created body maps and translated each of the body parts! 

In Geography, we have been thinking about the environmental regions around the world. To revisit sticky learning from last year (and earlier in our school year) we practiced our continents song!

In English, we have been reading about Razvani, the Fire-Fiend from The Firework Maker's Daughter. After collecting some amazing adjectives and creating some brilliant expanded noun phrases, we have created our own character description of him. 

Razvani was a wicked beast with a crackling voice. He was very powerful. His body was like a man submerged in fire. His face was like a mask of magma. His weakness is water. He was mysterious and unknown.

Razvani is a ball of flames. His enemy is the water. He smells like a crackly, burning oven. He booms so loudly that he makes hearts scream. His laugh is so loud that it could make a volcano erupt. Every step he takes makes the ground crack and shake.

Razvani was a mysterious creature. His dark eyes beamed into your soul and his shadow was red and orange. His great footsteps bashed against the gravel. Razvani's voice crackled and boomed across the world, sending out an explosion of fire every second. He had a black heart. The great Fire-Fiend has never been defeated. 

In our PE lesson today, we continued our topic of trust. In teams, we navigated the different areas of our playground and nature area to find different clues. After we had found them all, we worked together to work out what object the clues were referring to and had to make them with our bodies. To find all of our clues and make our shapes it took us 17 minutes! Can you spot our clock, shoes, fire, piano, tree and castles?

In English, we have been reading The Firework Maker's Daughter. Each week, we are improving our reading and writing skills by using our reading VIPERS to understand each chapter and then completing a writing task based on our understanding of the chapter. So far, we have written a letter as Lalchand (the main character's father) and a diary entry as Chulak (the main character's cheeky best friend!) 

In French, we have been learning the names of our body parts in French. Have a listen to some of us singing the French version of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes! 

In our first PE lesson of Trust and Trails we guided a partner through an obstacle course. Our partner had to have their eyes closed for the entire course! We thought about what made it easier or harder to trust our partner and the skills we needed to use to complete each obstacle. 

We have been testing our hypothesis of 'More energy = higher volume'. To test it, we split into groups and completed an investigation about different types of musical instruments. We learnt that our hypothesis was correct BUT we also found out that with bells, the volume doesn't always change but the speed of the sound increases.

In Geography today, we have answered the question What are the environmental regions? To help us to remember, we have created some actions and completed a 'table tour' of each region, using our reading comprehension skills to skim and scan facts to create fact files on each region. 

In tennis this week, we improved our control. Working in pairs, we took part in quick doubles matches and had to make sure that our serves and hits stayed in our courts!

Today in Art, we used the work of Marcus Coates to inspire us to create nests. First, we gathered natural resources and then thought about how we could make them look like a nest. Some of us started to think about how we could combine our materials without using traditional resources like glue or tape and some of us decided to keep our nests 'messy'. 

Today we listened to the song 'Count on Me' by Bruno Mars. Lots of us already knew it, which made us very excited to be learning to sing it and compose our own recorder accompaniment. We have recorded our first draft of the song and can't wait to notice how much we improve each week!

We challenged ourself today in maths and completed a range of open learning activities to revisit learning in maths and make sure it feels sticky. This week, the main focus of our stations was number. We completed challenges all about place value, halving, adding up to 3-digits, multiplication and number facts. We also started to think about our learning for the week ahead and had our first go at measuring different lengths of string by using a ruler accurately. 

In Art today, we have been exploring the work of Marcus Coates. We learnt that he took his inspiration from birds and after expressing our opinions on his art work, we also took inspiration from birds and created some nests using charcoal. 

In English, we have been exploring explanation texts. In our table teams, we decided which features should belong in an explanation text and which shouldn't. After that, we created a toolkit that we can use when we create our own explanation texts.