Literacy
Our class novel this term is War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. It’s a very good book and we all love it so far. It’s basically about a horse (a Red Bay called Joey) who gets bought by a man called Captain Nicholls to help him fight in the war (WWI). We are using War Horse to learn comprehension strategies like metalinguistics, summarising and predicting. We predict that Joey’s best friend Albert (a teenager) is going to join him to fight in the war.
In writing, at the start of term, we wrote recounts of personal experiences. Our assessment was all about our years in primary school, and we included all the teachers that have taught us and all the trips we went on. We are currently writing in the style of a diary and as a soldier in the trenches in WWI. Soon we will be moving on to imaginative writing and writing Christmas stories for our wee buddies. We often annotate pieces of writing so we know all about metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia, and alliteration that we can use in our stories.
Sophie and Danielle
Numeracy
In numeracy we have learned about rounding, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, time and money. We often play games like ‘I know that…’. They are double/halving games where you start by getting a partner and deciding on a number that you and your partner would like to start with and you either keep doubling that number or halving that number. You can go really high and really low.
We have learned about multiplying two-digit numbers by three-digit numbers.
For example:
264×40=?
First, multiply by ten (264×10), which is 2640
Now multiply 2640×4, which is 10,560 (so that’s how you do that!)
We know how to convert improper fractions to mixed number fractions and the other way round and we also know how to create other equivalent fractions and find fractions of amounts.
Kayci, Kai and Aiden
WW1
We have been learning about WWI. We know some of the reasons why WWI started, including the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. In WWI, some countries were friendly with others and took sides with them. The countries belonged to either The Triple Entente, The Triple Alliance or were Neutral (which means they did not fight for any side). The Triple Entente were: Great Britain, France and Russia. The Triple Alliance were: Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary. We have learned about the use of propaganda in WWI and made our own propaganda posters. We have learned the names for the different parts of the trenches and what they mean. For example, a sump was built to drain some of the water away from the trenches and sandbags were used to build walls to block water and bullets. Our class novel helps us with our understanding of WW1 too.
Kayci and Aaron
Music
We are learning to read music! We know: a treble clef, bass clef, stave, beats to the bar, bars and bar lines. We have learned the names of the notes and how many counts they get. For example, a crotchet gets one count, a quaver gets half a count, and a semibreve gets four counts. We can read the notes on cards and clap the beat. We are soon going to be learning the names of notes and where they are on a keyboard or glockenspiel.
Darrel and Mazie
Reading Schools
We (Aiden, Kay and Jayden) are our class reading champions for this year, and this year we are going for our Gold Award. We are going to start a club with Mrs Kennedy, getting the library ready for use for the classes. After we do that, we will be able to organise activities for the other classes. We have a Book Buzz area on our Google classroom and a Book Buzz library in our actual classroom. Aiden is the DEAR time monitor for our class and he makes sure we all ‘drop everything and read’ on most days. Mrs Brock runs a lot of the things we do, for example she helps us run reading challenges and activities. Sometimes we have a Reading Schools assembly that the reading champions will help with or be involved in.
Kay, Jayden and Aiden
