Sail away!
In class, we’ve been studying the famous explorer, Christopher Columbus. Having learnt where he travelled to and how his journeys were funded, we now wanted to explore how he and his crew travelled. Year 4 looked closely at the three ships that were used for Christopher Columbus’s first voyage. We then examined some images of those vessels used on that exploration.
How were they made? Where did everyone sleep? What happened to the ship in bad weather?
This led us to thinking about how to sketch a ship, focusing closely on the shape and the size.
We explored ideas and collected visual and other information to help us to develop our work. Using these resources, we set to work on sketching the outline of a ship. To begin with, we used whiteboards and pens to follow a tutorial online. Working alongside an artist, helped to get a starting point for our own drawings. Care, attention to detail, patience and determination were just some of the skills shown during this lesson.
I’m sure you will agree that this artwork is just superb and incredibly lifelike!
We will be displaying this work in our shared area.
Posted here are some examples by the proud artists!
When complete, the children were then able to carefully add colour.
Stay and Play
There will be no Relax and Read this week. Instead, you’re invited to stay for a Communication, Language and Literacy session. You will join your child to retell and make up stories and play games to help develop their speaking and listening skills.
See you there!
Phonics
Thanks to everyone who attended our ‘Early Reading’ workshop last week.
We will begin phase 2 of Letters and Sounds this week. Phase 2 involves learning phonemes to read and write simple words.
During this phase children will learn their first 19 phonemes:
- Set 1: s a t p
- Set 2: i n m d
- Set 3: g o c k
- Set 4: ck (as in duck) e u r
- Set 5: h b l f ff (as in puff) ll (as in hill) ss (as in hiss)
They will use these phonemes to read and spell simple “consonant-vowel-consonant” (CVC) words: sat, tap, dig, duck, rug, puff, hill, hiss
All these words contain 3 phonemes.
Blending
Children need to be able to hear the separate sounds in a word and then blend them together to say the whole word.
Segmenting
Children need to be able to hear a whole word and say every sound that they hear.
If you have any questions, please ask!
From Decapolagests to Hellos and Goodbyes – Year 3’s Weekly Round-Up
This week’s maths has been all about giving context to our calculations by telling a story and asking a question. For example: “Talha had 452 cookies. Kashif gave him 30 more. How many cookies did Talha have altogether?” We used our place value grids to tackle these calculations and these will help us with our column addition next week.
Collaborative learning has been a recurrent theme across the week, where we’ve given feedback on each other’s learning in English and worked together to find facts in a newspaper article…
… and used our sketching skills to draw a new species of animal we found on our exploration (Emily discovered a Decapolagest!). We did this by drawing its head, eyes and mouth and passing it to the next person. Next, we drew the body, arms and wings and passed it on. Then, we drew the creature’s legs and tail. Finally, we drew the animal’s feet!
It certainly produced some humorous results!
Our wacky pictures helped us plan a descriptive piece of writing.
Continuing the team work theme, in groups we have also researched our continents in our topic lessons, and presented our findings to the class!
Using our drama skills, we recreated a scene from a short film. When Miss Wilson shouted, ‘Freeze frame!’ we had to hold our positions whilst the audience discussed how each character would be feeling and why, using what we knew from the clip.
Here are some action shots from our PE lesson, where we practised our ginormous jumping and our huge handstands.
We even got the benches out for some balance and stretching, for the first time! It was very exciting!
Sadly, this week, we had to say goodbye to two of our classmates: Maya and Setayesh. You will both be deeply missed and we wish you lots of luck for your new schools, but we’re sure you will both be fantastic!
A humongous welcome to our new friend Talha, who joined the Year 3 team on Thursday! Already, you are a valued member of the class and I look forward to getting to know you better.
Great artwork
We’ve been working on perspective in art to be able to create drawing which are in proportion. We started off by exploring shading as a technique to make things look 3D. Then, we moved on to using one-point perspective to draw a corridor or a street. This week, we tried out two-point perspective and drew a street from the corner rather than the middle of the road.
Nico got a certificate for his work on two-point perspective this week. (In the display above, his picture is the middle one on the right hand side.)
Grace has enjoyed it so much, she created this entire city at home and brought it in to show us!
Spelling Practice
Each week, the children bring home either a spelling activity or a list of spellings to learn. Unfortunately, a number of children haven’t been completing this task to a high enough standard and some haven’t completed it at all.
We all looked at some good examples today and we’ll be working hard to ensure we’re all producing such good spelling practice from now on.
Inventions to make the world a better place
Last week’s homework was to create a competition entry for the Young Imagineers project. It required the children to think about how to make the world a better place and invent something that would contribute to this.
Here are some of the children’s favourites:
Lawn Mower Shoes (my favourite)
Salt-Water Purifier
Air-Powered Vehicles
Insta-Charger
Peace Sprinkler
I’ll be uploading all of the entries over the weekend so keep your fingers crossed.
Storytelling
This week the children enjoyed writing and performing their own version of ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, who do you see?’
Please ask your child to show you their book, ‘Reception, Reception, who can you see?’ next time you are in the classroom.
Sport at Allerton Grange
Year 6 had their first visit to Allerton Grange today to work with their sports leaders. We enjoyed basketball, football, hockey and netball activities which were well-delivered by the Y11s and well-received by the Y6s.
Thanks to Elias who was our class cameraman today and caught some great action-shots.
Assembly
Thank you to all who attended our assembly today.
The children have worked hard to prepare for this and have practised speaking with confidence and volume.
The song was chosen by the class and was great fun to learn! Well done to all!