It’s been a while since we’ve been in touch, so here’s what we’ve been up to.  

In maths we have been investigating everything Fractions, using Bloom’s Taxonomy.  To begin with, Mr Hunter set up a table which had several different types of questions and activities for us to do.  It encouraged us to think and interact more deeply with the questions and activities rather than answer from a text book.  These activities also had points attached to them.  We had to use the following skills in order to complete the different activities:

• ‘Remembering’ (1 point)
• ‘Understanding’ (2 points),
• ‘Applying’ (3 points)
• ‘Analysing’ (4 points)
• ‘Evaluating’ (5 points)
• ‘Creating’ (6 points).

The more challenging the activity, the more points you accumulated.  This meant that you could do some of the Lower Order activities and earn one or two points, but you still had a lot of points to earn in order to reach your individual point total.  We had to challenge and extend ourselves by doing more of the Higher Order activities….and that led some of us into unfamiliar territory; decimals and percentages!   Here are some examples of the activities.

• ‘Maths Masterpieces’ – Creating
• ‘Death by Maths’ – Analysing and Evaluating
• ‘Problem Solving’ & ‘Maths Mysteries’ – Analysing
• ‘Fractions Top Trump’ cards (simplification and equivalence) – Applying

These activities, and the questions which came with them, gave us more ownership of our work.  For example, ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’ types of questions are lower order questions that generally require a simple response.   At the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy, ‘creating’ and ‘evaluating’ questions provided a greater challenge for us.  It encouraged us to think more independently or work together in a pair, drawing upon our knowledge and skills of what we had already learned about fractions, and apply them within different contexts.

One of the problems which we found out is that unless we ask the right question, we are unlikely to get the actual answer which we want we want.  Therefore ‘Higher Order Thinking’ skills and Bloom’s Taxonomy was a great way for us to ask more in-depth questions as well as providing opportunities to explain our work in more detail.  

This week has also been very busy with all the preparation we have been doing for the Christmas Fayre. We have been making snowman doorstops, hot chocolate pouches and snow globes. We have also been working on prices for these.  Our prices are based upon the quality of the product, the time and effort that has gone into the making and the size of the product.  Here’s what we came up with:

• Snowman doorstops – £3.00
• Snow globes – £2.50
• Hot Chocolate pouches (large) – £1.50
• Hot chocolate pouches(small) – £1.00

 In Literacy, we have been learning about biographies. We are writing a biography about a classmate.  We had to interview each other to get as much information as we could before planning our biography.  We are doing this in preparation for writing a biography about Anne Frank as part of our World War II topic.

 Last Thursday we also went on the Zoo Bus. The Zoo Bus is a workshop that teaches us about the dangers to animals caused by humans. We found out about habitat loss, over hunting, pollution and natural disasters. There were many different boxes with each giving hints so we could decide what threat it was.  This was very informative and all of us were intrigued by all of the dangers we cause.

 By Cara