Year 3

It has been such a pleasure to meet parents and carers in family meetings this week, and in the instances where we were unable to do so, we look forward to meeting you very soon! 

This week in history, children have built upon their understanding of Tudors to consider the different reasons for their ambitious, worldwide exploration. In science, we have continued to explore the functions of different parts of plants, with a particular focus on stems. We have carried out experiments, placing sticks of celery in water with food dye, and look forward to making careful observations in future lessons. DT has been exciting, with the children reflecting on the variety of moving mechanisms in their books from home. They have had the chance to create their own moving mechanisms, which they will soon use in their own books with moving parts! In maths, we have started a new topic - fractions. We have considered ‘parts’ and the ‘whole’, whilst considering the numerator and denominator of a given fraction.

          

  

Key Messages

• Key vocab: numerator, denominator, fraction, part, whole, evaporate, absort, transport, voyage, trade

• KIRFS: 4 x table

• Spellings: this week we have reviewed spellings from January onwards. From next week out focus will turn to Year 3 Common Exception Word (‘red’ words).

 

Year 4 

What a great week in Year 4. We kicked it off with a Anglo-Saxon workshop. The children had a great time passing around artefacts and learning about the lifestyle of the Anglo-Saxons. They even got to recreate a ship burial and wore helmets and shields to get a feeling of what this would have been like. In science, we focused on our scientist Alexander Bell and his early work on the telephone. We set the children the task of making their own cup phone and exploring how the sound changed when they completed different activities. To understand how we know about the Anglo-Saxons and where they settled in Britain, in history we looked at where they buried urns in pagan cemeteries across East-Anglia. This was an exciting opportunity to test hypotheses and look for patterns. We have finally written and edited our nonsense poems in English this week. It was an opportunity to be really creative, making up both portmanteau and nonsense words. We then edited, improved and performed our poems with expression and actions. In maths, we have been adding and subtracting fractions with the same denominator using arithmetic and visual methods. Using skills converting whole numbers into improper fractions, the children have been able to apply their multiplication recall facts and use inverse to check their answers. Year 4 have been leading the way within TTRS competitions around the school and have recently challenged Year 3 & 5 to a multiplication battle! Yes Day was a great success in Year 4. We saw funky, colourful hair styles, pyjamas and even guitar cases and backpacks. Each class has an extra rule to break and we really enjoyed the day.

        

Key Messages

• Key vocab: improper, proper, vibration, portmanteau, sanitary, artefact

• KIRFs: 7 x

• Spelling rule: auto 

• Please make sure the children are bringing healthy snacks for breaktime. 

• World book dress up - Friday 8th March