Welcome back Base 4!

What a fantastic start to the New Year, after a lovely Christmas break. I thoroughly enjoyed my time off, as did the children, but I am very excited to explore the new topic with Base 4.

In Literacy we have started our new book 'Shadow of the Minotaur' and we are all on the edge of our seats, wanting to know what's going to happen next... We have been planning our own story, using inspiration from the story. The main focus has been developing the character and setting, whilst also using a range of vocabulary. Next week we will be focusing on writing different types of sentences, we will start by looking at sentence structures which we will then apply to writing our own adventure story using the plans.

In maths we have been mastering how to wr up to 7 digit numbers in words and we have all got it!! We moved on to solving problems based on using our place value knowledge, some of them were quite challenging and made our brains work (even mine!). We then moved onto rounding up to 7 digit numbers to 10, 100, 1000 and 10000, which we then applied to some problems linked to rounding. Next week we will continue to work on rounding, but we will be applying it to addition and subtraction calculations which we will need to estimate the answers. We will also be having a look at Roman numerals and comparing them to Greek numerals.

Our Learning Journey work has begun this week with some investigation into Ancient Greek pottery and artwork used on the pots. We investigated the types of patterns used on the pots and the different shapes they used to create. Next week we will follow up our art lesson with another investigation into famous Ancient Greek artists, discovering why they were famous and what they created.
In Science this week we finished off our unit on forces by investigating how air resistance worked, through the use of parachutes. We had a challenge to keep the paperclips safe! We had to create parachutes that would lower the paper clips to the ground from different heights. The parachute that created the most air resistance won!! Some did get disqualified for dropping the paperclips! Next week in science we are going to be investigating natural light sources.

Next week is another busy week, the theatre trip is on Tuesday which will be a fantastic afternoon and I am looking forward to seeing you all at our parents evening on Wednesday or Thursday.

Reminders:
Mymaths homework is due for Wednesday next week (one-off change to the due date), but there will be another Mymaths task set on Monday as well, in order for us to keep practising our skills. Literacy homework is due for Tuesday — I do monitor who is bringing homework in on time consistently. Please, please, please keep practising spellings and times tables (we really need to crack the times tables).

I hope you have an enjoyable weekend and I will see you all next week.

Miss Phillips