Base 4 update

This week has been another busy week in Base 4 as usual.

In Literacy this week we have taken concise, short notes from a video all about George Stephenson which has proved to be very interesting and has left the children wanting to find out more! We then had to decide which of our notes were relevant for our main focus (the invention of the railway and the man behind it); this was followed by identifying the key technical vocabulary that we will need to use in our writing, such as locomotive, steam engine and cast iron. Using our notes and technical vocabulary we started to build sentences thinking about different sentence openers that we can use (very impressed with how many the children could come up) and how to make our boring sentences fabulous! Next week we will take our sentences and sort them into main focuses in order to put them into paragraphs, which will lead to building cohesion between each paragraph.

Our Maths lessons this week started with venturing out into the playground to discover parallel and perpendicular lines in real life, the children got to take photos of these on the iPads and then had a go at drawing their own using chalk (this was a bit tricky without rulers but we understood the main concept). We followed this by the children labelling and explain parallel and perpendicular lines on the photos they took and finding them on the Piet Mondrian paintings. We found that squares and rectangles both have parallel and perpendicular lines which then moved us on to working out the perimeter of the squares and rectangles that Piet Mondrian has used in his paintings. Next week we will continue to work on the perimeter of shapes, in particular composite rectilinear shapes and moving on to finding the area of squares and rectangles.

We have completed the design stage of our carriages project and some of us managed to start thinking about creating a prototype to check if the designs were suitable or not – next week we will be finishing our prototypes and improving our designs. We also started to create the front covers for our topic books which are looking really good; this has required the children to be specific in sizing, detail and cutting. We WILL get those finished ready to be put onto our Learning Journey books.

Our harvest practise has been going very well in class, making sure everyone knows their part and where they need to stand. I would like to say well done to all the children for their confidence in performing in front of other. We are looking forward to performing for all of you at our Harvest festival on Tuesday 20th October.
Next week is going to be a very busy week for Base 4; we will be making a start on our enterprise project, finishing our front covers for our Learning Journey books and continuing with our DT project.

TRIP

Don't forget we are going on our adventure to discover more about steam trains at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester on Wednesday 21st October. You will need a packed lunch (unless you are having one from school), a warm coat (the outside temperatures have been much cooler this week), £1 for the train ride (if it is running) and yourselves ready to learn. We are going in school uniform; please ensure your child is wearing the red school jumper.

Reminders

Don't forget the homework project that I set last week, which is due in after half term. MyMaths still needs to be completed before Friday we are not all completing this on time – there will be a MyMaths set every week and I will also start sending home additional maths activities to improve our using and applying skills.

Spellings and times tables- Practise makes perfect!!! Please keep going with both!

Well done for all your hard work and questioning this week Base 4, I have been very impressed, especially with us speeding up during lessons.