Decimals and percentages

This week in English, we have been discussing story structures (beginning, middle and end) and planning our own stories in preparation for St George's Day where we will make a school book of stories. So far, we have drawn and described a good character, a bad character and the setting. We will look in more detail at how our stories will be structured next week. 

In Maths, we have been consolidating our knowledge of place value, using dienes to represent numbers, writing numbers in numerals and words and counting forwards from any given number. We are getting much better at counting in tens. 

We have been learning about the medieval times ready for our trip to the History Museum next Tuesday. We have looked at pictures of castles, identified appropriate vocabulary and built our own castles in teams. We have used symbolism to design our own coat of arms for a shield based on our families.

We began our Drama lessons this week with our Drama teacher Albert. He helped us practise how to sing songs from the musical Annie. 

In English, the older children finished off our unit on instruction writing by incorporating the features we learnt into our own written instructions for things we can do ourselves, such as recipes or how to make paper airplanes. 

In Maths, we studied the relationship between decimals and percentages and looked at how to find percentages of different amounts. 

We had lots of fun maintaining different, more challenging types of balances in Gymnastics.

And in preparation for our trip to the History Museum next week we researched aspects of the Middle Ages, which included using our laptops to take virtual 3D tours of castles in Turkey and Germany. We also learnt about how the farmers and peasants lived, usually in very sparse, cold huts with no doors or windows.

 

Water purification center

The first week back at school after Christmas has meant lots of new changes! The biggest change of all being that the Year 1/2s (and sometimes the reception children) have been making the most out of our upstairs classrooms, learning Phonics, Maths and English in a more focused way. 

The Year 1/2s have been consolidating their learning of digraphs by learning an action to go with each, practising writing tricky words and also using capital letters for names and to begin sentences. They have been learning the difference between a sound, word and sentence. They have also been using all of these skills to write about their Christmas holidays using adjectives to describe. In Maths, they have been consolidating their knowledge of addition and subtraction using a variety of different methods. They will use these skills to solve problems next week. 

In EYFS, the children have been practising writing and recognising numbers up to 10. They have been finding numbers hidden in rice, counting using blocks and counters, painting familiar numbers and writing numbers in playdough. They have been learning some simple sounds and using them to identify initial sounds in words.

The older children began the week learning about Instructions in Literacy, focusing on features like precise language, imperative verbs and sequencing commands. 

In Maths we revised Decimals, including how to round numbers to the nearest thousandth, hundredth and tenth. 

We practiced how to perform Gymnastics routines through a range of different balances in PE. 

During the week, our school visited the Water Purification Centre in Granollers and learnt all about how the water from our toilets and sinks is purified and cleaned through various filters, ready to go to the river. It was very informative and educational. 

Finally, in Art, we studied the life and work of Catalonian Artist Salvador Dali, who specialised in Surrealist Art. Surrealism is the portrayal of images through dream-like perspectives. We attempted to replicate some of Dali's most famous pieces, and produced our own Surrealist art pictures.

Christmas Performance

This week, the young children have been completing lots of Christmas activities! Our Maths has been consolidationg our prior knowledge through Christmas themed activities and in Phonics, we have been reading and writing Christmas sentences.
The older children began the week by looking at how Christmas is celebrated around the world. We also made lots of Christmas decorations for our play.
We all baked cookies and made special Christmas boxes to take them home in and we decorated our salt dough with Cynthia and Katie's grandma (a huge thank you to both)
On Tuesday was our Christmas Performance and it went brilliantly! Check out the show on You Tube. 
On Friday, we played party games and had a special Christmas Lunch with our families.
We wish you all a Merry Christmas and we will see you in the New Year!