Welcome back!  After a quick check in to find out how everyone’s holiday went, it was straight back into learning!  This week we have started to plan our class assembly.  As our assembly falls on 4 November, we thought it would be a good idea to focus on Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night.  We’ve been working in groups to research specific topics related to this, and we will be sharing our learning with the rest of the class to help them learn too.  We’ve also been busy learning our songs, and they’re beginning to sound pretty good!  Miss Thomson has even promised to let everyone dab (normally banned in the classroom!) if the songs are word perfect by Tuesday!

In literacy, we started a new novel called ‘Christophe’s Story’ and our work for the term will focus around this.  Christophe is a refugee from Rwanda, which is a country in Africa.  We found out where Rwanda is in the world, and discovered that lots of people speak French there as it was a Belgian colony.  We worked in groups to research different aspects of life in Rwanda – such as where people live, what they eat, jobs they do – and compared this to life in the UK.  We found out that there were lots of differences, but some similarities too.  We know that Christophe and his family had to leave their country due to a war and we will be learning more about this as we work through the novel.  Everyone is really enjoying it so far, and we have had some excellent discussions during our reading sessions.

In maths, we are continuing to focus on subtraction with exchange.  This is quite a difficult concept to learn, and those of us who are finding it tricky are being encouraged to remember the power of YET – ‘I can’t do it’ is very different from ‘I can’t do it, yet!’  We are all making progress with this and will be moving on to multiplication next.

Next week, as part of our mini-topic on Guy Fawkes, we will be taking part in some science experiments!  Miss Thomson won’t be allowing any actual explosions, but we will be learning about chemical reactions and making our own water-powered rockets.  It would be great if everyone could bring in an empty bottle (about 500ml size would be perfect!) so that we can design and make plenty of rockets to launch into the atmosphere.

In art, we made some very atmospheric spooky pictures!  We continued to think about perspective and the use of background, middle ground and foreground.  Some of the pictures were very effective, well done!