We loved designing our winter windows. We worked with Miss Hamilton’s class to share the message ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year.’ Then we chose four different Christmas symbols and designed the background using tissue paper.

Please come and see them afterschool one day.

We have been learning about the properties of different materials. We sorted the materials into categories and discussed their different purposes.  We are going to apply these into our Castle and Bridges STEM challenges.

We developed our measuring skills by using our rulers to measure multiple points to ensure we could draw a straight line. We learned about different attachment techniques such as tabs, slot, flange, l-brace and gusset.

We work hard as a class to collect pom poms everyday for following class rules and showing kindness and support for others. When we reach the top of the jar we get to vote for a reward for our hard work. This time we chose making our own lemonade.

This activity also helped us develop some key skills in cutting and using a juicer. We also compared the taste between sweet and sour and made links to our learning about the senses in science.

We were so pleased to visit Paris this week as part of our French lesson when we called mademoiselle Reid (Mrs Gauld’s sister). She taught us some new French words and told us some interesting facts about Paris. We got to ask her lots of questions.
She agreed to be our new penpal so we can practise our writing in French 📝
merci beaucoup mademoiselle Reid 🙌🏻

We explored the art technique of salt painting to create the effect of fireworks exploding in the night sky. We combined PVA glue with salt to make our fireworks 3D and then used different colours of paint.

We also investigated the science of fire. We used a candle in a bowl of water and covered it with a plastic cup.  Fire needs three things to burn; oxygen, fuel and heat. These three things make up the fire triangle which you can see below.

If one of them is taken away, the fire is put out. By putting the cup over the candle, the oxygen is taken away from the fire so it goes out! But… it doesn’t go out straight away. This is because there is still some oxygen trapped inside the cup but once the fire has used up all the oxygen there is none left so the candle goes out.

We also completed a technology challenge to design our own firework rocket, we could use whatever materials we wanted and had to make our design unique.

We have been learning how to structure a story with a clear beginning, middle and end. We focused on developing characters and setting using interesting WOW words. In our spooky stories we developed a storyline using chapters and then typed up our books using Google Classroom.

We are so proud of our Spooky Stories, they have been published as books and added to our class library 🥳 We enjoyed reading our classmates stories.

We have been learning how sound can travel through different materials – solids, liquids and gases.

We completed different experiments, making predictions then observed and listened to the results.

We learned that sound is an energy and travels in sound waves through vibrating molecules. As the molecules vibrate they carry the sound and pass to other molecules. We discovered that molecules in gases are spread out, molecules are closer together in liquids so sound travels faster. But molecules are the closest in solids so sound travels the fastest through solids.

We made our own gongs using string and spoons to listen to sound travelling through a solid (string).

We also created a hydrophone (plastic bottle) to listen to sounds under the water.

We used rice to act as the air molecules so we could see them vibrate & move. We experimented with different instruments to observe how different sounds travel.

We celebrated Halloween with different arts and crafts, games and also learned some new French words.

We practised our skills using a French dictionary. We completed a crossword to learn some new French Halloween themed words.

We learned the technique of wax resistant painting using wax crayons to draw Halloween designs and then hid them under black paint. Using some Halloween magic, the colours were able to shine through the paint 👻

On Friday afternoon, we played some games and designed pop up cards to send to family & friends since we cannot visit them this year.

We did some ‘Boo-ling’ and ‘dookin’ for apples as well as mixing our own magic potions. We had a fun-filled afternoon.

We have been enjoying exploring our new literacy resource – First News.
This is a newspaper created for children to allow them to access the latest news in the UK and around the world. We have been using our comprehension strategies to develop our skimming and scanning, word finding and summarising skills.

We have been using maths to enhance our understanding in Health and Wellbeing. We investigated how much sugar was in popular food and drinks by measuring the amount of sugar using scales.

Then we used the data we gathered to compare the information and display it in a bar graph. We really had to think about a suitable scale for our graph. We learned to interpret the information and draw conclusions. We were absolutely shocked at the amount of sugar we eat each day!

But we also noticed that food labels sometimes show two different types of information. The nutritional label tells you what is in the full bottle/packet and also what is in a smaller amount (100ml). We thought this can sometimes be misleading and people may think they are eating less sugar than they are!