Base 4 weekly update

Welcome back after a lovely half term break! The children have been telling me about all the exciting things that they got to do during the holidays.

In Literacy this week we jumped back in time to become reporters in 1829, writing a newspaper report on the first passenger railway built by George Stephenson. We have all managed to not forget our capital letters; I am very, very pleased!! Everyone has tried really hard on their sentence structure and using commas to add additional information within a sentence. We had the chance to peer-assess our partner's work which allowed us to help each other out to make our writing even better. Next week we are moving on to analysing a section of the text from 'The Railway Children'. We will be looking at the type of language used and having a go and writing in the same style, as well as going on a small adventure!

We have moved onto multiplication and division in maths this week. We have worked on finding common multiples of two numbers and factors of 2 digit number, which put our times tables knowledge into practise. We followed this by playing some games which required us to apply our knowledge of multiples and factors in order for us to beat our partner. We also had an unexpected lesson with Mrs. Cador who taught us different tricks and rules for working out times tables quickly. Next week we will be continuing with multiplication and division, we will be working on a written method to multiply up to 4 digit numbers by 1 and 2 digit numbers.
Following our trip, during the week before half term, we thought it would be nice to capture our learning from that day in our Learning Journey books. The mini sketchbooks, which we took with us on our trip, have been placed in our books along with photos, captions and fact boxes about what we learnt.

We mixed our maths with art on Tuesday to create a Piet Mondrian painting using our knowledge of perimeter and area to create accurate squares and rectangles within our paintings. All of these paintings look fantastic up on the wall and will look great in our Learning Journey books with all of the maths working out. We have also started our steam train carriages, focusing on making sure all parts of it are strong enough and discussing exactly where parts of the carriage will need to go. We will continue with this next week.

As you may all know by now, we have altered the timetable to fit in an extra session of PE which is focussing on improving our fitness and increasing our stamina levels. Wednesday saw our first lesson of fitness based activities, we all worked hard (including me) and were very worn out by the end of the lesson, however with a few extra lessons and determination our fitness should increase greatly. Well done to everyone for taking part and trying your best, I was very impressed!!

Next week we will be starting our Enterprise challenge in our groups by looking at a range of aspects that are linked with business, such a team work and corporate branding. We will also start to develop our product ideas and decide how we will be making those products using only recycled materials.

Reminders:

Please don't forget to complete the MyMaths homework by Friday (I check who has completed Friday morning), Friday lunch time is too late! Some of us got a bit lazy towards the end of last term, let's pick it back up and make sure we get the most out of our homework.

Please, please, please keep practising your times tables (we should be able to do all of them by now) and your spellings — these are both really important as we link it into our lessons. Please also remember to be reading at home and writing in your reading record, I like to see what you think about your books!