Welcome back after a lovely Easter break. This week we have returned to our four operations to recap our learning and make sure we are using the most efficient strategies.

In our literacy, we had great fun creating a black out poem – picking vocabulary that was striking or interesting to us and then discarding the rest of the words from a base text.

We created a multi media piece of artwork of flowers in a vase inspired by Matisse. This took several phases and utilised oil pastels, watercolour, sketching, cutting and acrylic paint techniques.

In P.E we looked at an efficient warm up for our bodies and why this is important. We practiced different running drills and looked at how they could improve our running performance and form. We also planned our active diaries which we will create to track our fitness progress and activity goals.

This week, we have continued to work on our short division, building our confidence and dividing by larger digits.

In literacy, we wrote a recount of our class trip, ensuring it was an organised account in chronological order and using time connectives and past tense.

We learnt about the suffragettes and researched the life and achievements of a suffragette or suffragist. We used our notes to create an informational poster which will form the basis of our discussion next week.

We worked hard to complete our weaving and some of us started making Pompoms for our Easter craft. We continued with aversion skills in rugby tag- very competitive but showing great sportsmanship.

We also rejoined our various committees and took on our leadership roles. We had lots of fun using microbits and we have brought them into our class exploration time. We have created a coin toss microbit and a pedometer.

This week we have been very busy. In numeracy we have been using the bus stop method or short division to solve our division sums. We have also been singing our times tables to a song to help us remember them.

We continued our response writing, this time studying the painting ‘Orkney Pebbles’ by Hope Blamire. We are getting much more confident at accurately describing the subject matter and atmosphere in the art we study.

We had a fabulous day on Thursday at Verdant Works. While we had been studying cotton mills and what it was like working in them, it was an incredible experience to hear and see them working. We learnt so much about the Victorians and their way of life and the technologies of the time.

For our outdoor learning, we created comedy sketches in groups inspired by Comic Relief. These were very entertaining and all very unique!

We finished the week with Newport’s Got Talent. It was a brilliant end to the week with so many incredible skills on show.

This week we have started our response writing. We looked at Poppy Field by Monet and had to describe the different elements of the painting including the fore ground and the background. We had to say how each element made us feel and why. We got started on our newly rearranged spelling groups.

In numeracy, we started a new division strategy – using a bus stop method to make our dividing more efficient.

We enjoyed an interactive live lesson on farming, looking at different elements and challenges of current modern-day farming. We then investigated what farming was like in Victorian times – from cooking and heating water on a range, getting water from a well, using a ‘modern’ plough and the innovation of the use of threshing machines and how they resulted in lots of people losing their jobs.

We kept working on defending as a team in rugby and did some yoga pretzels to build on our flexibility, strength and to support our health and wellbeing.

This week, we have been enjoying lots of activities to support World Book Week. We joined a very interesting online author session with Holly Webb, who wrote A Girl’s Guide to Spying, hearing about her inspirations and writing process and having lots of chances to ask questions. We also enjoyed a British Library event called Global Food Stiries with Michel Rosen and friends. We experienced the magic of fantastic story telling and loved having the opportunity to follow instructed drawing activities with each of these. Some people used this session as their inspiration for their writing too. We loved dressing up as our favourite book characters and sharing our favourite stories.

In our writing, we focussed on word selection by creating a mini saga (100 words!) to enter into the Great Writers Nonsense stories competition. This really pushed our editing skills.

We explored multiplication word problems and checked we could identify and lay out the correct sum to solve each question. We continued to work on defensive play in rugby, considering how to cover the playing area to be most effective.

We also looked at significant events through the timeline of the Victorian period and sorted them into categories of Monarchy, Empire, Innovation and Social change.

This week, we have been learning about the day to day life of a child working in a Victorian cotton mill- what they may have eaten, worn, how they washed and what their working conditions were like. In our writing, we created imaginative recounts to describe what a day in their lives were like, focussing on writing in the first person and in the past tense.

We started to use a column multiplication method to multiply a one digit number by 2, 3 or 4 digits.

We learnt about defensive techniques in rugby, practicing working as a team to defend against attacking runners.

We also completed our ‘book creator’ information texts on our experiment into how sound waves move, including learning to change the format of a photo so it can be uploaded into our book.

This week we have been using the grid method to support our multiplication learning with the aim of increasing our confidence in being able to manipulate sums to solve them efficiently. Some of us moved onto identifying prime numbers.

We created symmetrical insect art using a collage technique, inspired by the Victorian fascination with entomology.

We learnt about the Victorian poet, Edward Lear, and looked at some of his nonsense poems such as the Owl and the Pussycat. We considered how the number of syllables effects the rhythm of a poem and then created limericks, following the AABBA rhyming pattern.

We worked on moving into space to support attacking play in rugby and had a great judo session.

This week we have been consolidating our work on multiplying, looking at the nine times table and starting to explore a column strategy for multiplication. We also practiced moving from one operation to another, to check we could apply the correct procedure.

In literacy, we used a picture of a dragon as inspiration for our imaginative story, and focussed on revisiting our work to make sure we had met our success criteria and to edit to improve. We consolidated some of our grammar and punctuation learning, in particular looking at identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions.

We have started two new initiatives- Monday morning Mile and Four minute Fridays, both to challenge ourselves to improve our ‘daily mile’ performances. We also set up our ‘bakery’ which is to encourage handling money and counting change in a real-life inspired play setting.

This week we have continued our learning of multiplication- looking at multiplying by 10, 100 and 1000, some of us progressing onto decimal numbers. We then furthered this learning by multiplying by multiples of ten, growing in confidence to manipulate sums to maximise efficiency.

In our writing we moved onto using onomatopoeia and created a story around a given title and starter sentence. We revisited apostrophes for possession and looked at their, there and they’re- identifying their correct application.

We continued with ‘Strip the Willow’ and progressed onto picking up and putting down the rugby ball at speed, safely. We also completed a series of investigations around waves and vibrations and started using book creator to record our experiment and findings.

This week we have finished our work on addition and subtraction by looking at word problems, identifying which operation was needed and then choosing the best method for completing the sum. Some people moved onto multiple step word problems. We then started our learning on multiplication – using arrays to show that multiplication was commutative – we could swap the order of the numbers over, and we still got the same result. We linked this with finding the area of a space or shape.

In grammar we revisited determiners – identifying whether we should use this, that, these or those depending on distance and whether the item was singular or plural. Our imaginative writing was inspired by a spooky piece of music, and we created stories with lots of description and alliteration. We completed reading comprehension on Charles Rennie Macintosh and Robert Burns, working on answering in sentences and including the question in our answer. In rugby, we worked on observational skills so we could move into space. We started learning Strip the Willow in Scottish Country dancing.  

We all presented our Scots poems, and the standard was very high. So many pupils had put lots of work in. We are very pleased that Donald, Ariyah and Olivia M are going to share their poems on Monday in together time.