Base 4 weekly update

Another busy week in Base 4, as usual. We started our week with a visitor, Imran, who helped us to understand his religion, Islam, more and appreciate another religion from his point of view. It was very informative allowing the children to learn a lot through a journey to Makkah, experiencing the Pilgrimage. He also took the time to answer our questions very accurately so that we could understand it further.

We have really developed as writers this week in Literacy, using our class text as a guide to support us. We have followed our plans to start writing an adventure story, focusing on building the tension and developing the character and setting throughout the whole story. We also had a go at using different sentences to have an impact on the reader. The children should be very proud of what they have produced as they have taken on board all the skills we have practised and used the models of writing to structure their writing. We now need to go back to our stories and proof-read them to make sure that it all makes sense and is interesting (makes us sit on the edge of our seats). Next week, we will continue to write our stories, focussing on writing the problem (the main part of the story) to keep the reader interested. We will continue to develop our sentences and look at a range of homophones to further our spelling.

In maths we have almost cracked rounding to 10, 100, 1000 and 10000, which we then applied to some estimating addition and subtraction problems. Whilst also having a go at writing explanations to our answers. Following this, we started to use number lines that had both positive and negative numbers (which we are all quite confident with), so that meant we could move on and apply this to different problems, which involved analysing data ad finding the difference between numbers (including negatives). Whilst also having a go at writing explanations to our answers. Next week in Maths we are going to have a look at Roman numerals, reading, writing and converting. We will then have a look at Ancient Greek numerals as well, to put into our Learning Journey books.

On Monday afternoon we did some research to find out more about Ancient Greek pottery, focusing on why the Ancient Greeks put different types of patterns onto their pottery. We found out that they used to document different life events through drawings. We followed this with some reading of our class text and exploring the way the author has used the type of language.

Tuesday afternoon was a very exciting afternoon; we jumped on the coach with all the excited Key Stage 2 children, most of whom were very much looking forward to visiting the New Vic Theatre. Once we were in the theatre we found our seats and got comfortable and then the lights went down and the performance of Robin Hood and Marion began. It was a fantastic experience for all the children and the performance was great!

Our PE sessions this term are based around dodgeball and we started our first session this week, it was very cold but we all learnt to dodge and target the balls. Next week in PE we will continue to develop our dodgeball skills and put them into a game scenario.

In Science this week we started our new topic, discussing different sources of light and working out how we see different objects. We had to discuss in detail whether or not the moon was a source of light and eventually we found out that actually the moon is a rock and the light from the sun reflects off the moon to make it shine. Next week we will start to look at the earth, moon and the sun to see how they are linked.

It was lovely this week to see so many parents and have chance to sit down and get to know you all a bit better. All the children are doing really well and you should be very proud.

Next week is our second Singfest rehearsal, which we have been practising very hard for. A little bit of time could be taken this week to make sure we really know the words. This is the last rehearsal before the performance at the Victoria Hall.

Reminders:

MyMaths, I am very sorry that I forgot to set a MyMaths homework this week, but next week will be back to normal. Times tables and spellings must be practised they are the foundation of all our learning.