Base 4 weekly news

A great week in Base 4 full of learning and enthusiastic children. I have been very impressed with the work ethic from everyone this week; we have given everything a go and tried our hardest to apply ourselves within different tasks. Well done Base 4, keep it up for one more week and then you can have a well-deserved rest.

This week in Literacy we have been completing our mythical creature descriptions, focussing on using a wide range of vocabulary. We have looked at a lot of different synonyms, for examples we explored synonyms for boring descriptive words such as; big, scary, angry and run/move. We could then apply these words (some of them were new to us) in our writing to develop the description of the beast and make it interesting for the reader. To support us further with our writing, we had a look at other texts to treasure hunt ideas from. We looked at a description written by Anthony Horowitz and I wrote a description of my creature to demonstrate what a good one looks like. After we brought our descriptions to an end, we moved on to exploring Democracy and what this means. This is linking our History and Literacy lessons, due to democracy having been introduced in Greece first. Next week we will be holding a debate in Base 4; we will be deciding if Greece should have become a democratic society or not (advantages and disadvantages). We will be holding a debate and arguing for and against different topics, like a democratic society would, which will be followed up by with a written balanced argument.

In maths we have worked very hard to understand fractions and decimals. We have added and subtracted fractions with denominators that are the same multiple, moving onto multiplying fractions and whole numbers. We discussed how multiplying and adding fractions was different. Within this we have also been practising simplifying fractions to display them in the simplest form. Some of us then moved on to converting fractions to decimals and applying this within problems giving reasoned explanations. Next week, we are moving onto multiplication and division, using the written methods. We will ensure that we are secure with written multiplication and division and then we will start to develop our skills with solving multi-step problems.

Our Ancient Greek Amphora pots have now got handles and are looking fantastic. Next week we will get them painted with the patterns ready to be displayed in our classroom. We will be mixing paints to create the desired colours and using a range of brush strokes to create a neat finish with a detailed pattern.
In history we have continued with our historic timeline, looking at significant events during the Ancient Greek period. We looked at how to take notes as historians, ensuring we did not copy straight from the book, whilst also ensuring we had sufficient notes to then use in writing. We then started to use our notes to write a paragraph which explains what happened at a particular time in history. Next week we will complete our timelines and present them in our Learning Journey books.

In Science we started to look at the solar system and what it is made up of. We did some research about the Sun Earth and Moon, to place them in order of size. We put all the planets in order using our blow up models of each planet. Then we discovered how shadows are created, and how they change throughout the day when created by the sun. Next week we will continue our science topic by discovering different time zones and explaining why they are different around the world.

Reminders:

As we are moving onto multiplication and division it is very important that we practise our times tables and we are able to apply them to division.

Preparation for our independent writing time should be underway and it needs to be ready for Thursday 11th February.