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.

 

All about Christmas

This week, it's been all about Christmas! We have been writing letters to santa, making Christmas cards and decorating our classroom full of Christmas crafts! We were lucky to have two parents volunteer on Friday to help us to make salt dough Christmas ornaments; thank you Cynthia and Maria! We can't wait to decorate them next week! This week we have also been working hard on our Christmas performance ready for next Tuesday. We can't wait to show you our Christmas play!

The older children had lots of fun learning about coordinates in Maths this week. When we gained a deeper understanding of how x and y axis' works, we played games of Battleship, which everyone really loved! Later in the week we looked at how we can use coordinates to translate whole shapes to different areas of a grid using positional instructions. 

In Literacy we read a short book called Baby Jesus' Christmas Party, which tells the nativity story from the Innkeepers perspective. We then wrote diary entries as the Innkeeper, retelling our account of the night Jesus was born. 

We looked at different ways to make Christmas Pop up cards in Design and Technology, and will continue to do these until next week. 

On Friday, the school went into Llinars market to perform songs from our Christmas play to the public. We raised lots of money for our end of year trip, and everyone had a great time.

Some poetry

This week in English, the children continued their learning about instructions. They learnt how to be 'bossy' in order to use 'bossy' (imperative) verbs such as go, put, say, cut etc. which tell people what to do. This culminated in a sandwich making lesson where children had to use these verbs to explain to me how to make a sandwich before carrying out their instructions and making their own sandwiches! After this, they wrote down their instructions in their writing books using their phonic knowledge learnt so far including tricky words. They really worked hard on this piece of work and it was a proud moment to see their completed written pieces.

In Maths, the year ones and twos continued learning about the value of numbers with regards to place value and used and drew dienes blocks to represent their numbers. The younger children focused on counting to 10 or 20 and recognising numbers.

The children have all planted a seed and are ready to watch it grow and write about the progress of their plant! We have been learning about what plants need to grow and also about the different parts of a flowering plant.

The older children began learning about Poetry in Literacy. We created our own cute/scary monsters and started to plan narrative poems about them, using poetic techniques such as alliteration and similes.

In Numeracy, we started our topic on length and perimeter, focusing on solving lengths of different sides of shapes using the given lengths of other sides in those shapes.

The class were super excited to learn about Antarctica! We watched some fascinating documentaries about life in extremely cold weather, made polar bear pictures using plastic bags to replicate ice bergs, and began planning PowerPoint presentations to depict various areas of interest regarding the Antarctic.

On another note, please could you encourage all the children to familiarise themselves with the songs for the upcoming Christmas performance in December. Your support with this will be hugely appreciated.

At the end of the week, we said farewell to Elena, whose support and care for the children will be sadly missed. We wish you all the best in the future and hope to see you again one day. Finally, let me personally thank all the staff, parents and students for all the well wishes and gifts for my Birthday. It was a truly special day.