Geography: Fantastic Fieldwork!
Today, Year 6 ventured to Moortown Park – an urban green space – to conduct their Geography fieldwork. The children were trying to measure carbon stores in the locality. Carbon stores are known as ‘places where carbon is stored in the environment’. To calculate this, they measured the girth (the distance around the outside of something thick) of different trees. They did this by sampling: a way of collecting fieldwork data without measuring everything.
This coming week, we will use this information to work out how much carbon is stored in the trees.
Have a look at us being geographers:
Help at home: To link with our writing skills, spot the parenthesis used in this post!
Writing: character descriptions
This week, Year 4 are writing their character descriptions of Podkin One-Ear. This is the main character from our class novel by Kieran Larwood.
Purpose: to give the reader information about a character.
Audience: children and adults
We’ve spent the last few weeks exploring Podkin One-Ear. We’ve discussed how we could describe both his appearance and his personality to somebody who hasn’t read the book. Our aim has been for the reader to get a detailed and clear picture of Podkin in their heads, without needing to see a picture.
As a class, your children came up with some fantastic adjectives to describe Podkin which they are using in their writing.
Stay tuned to find out how they go…
Help at home: close your eyes and ask your children to describe Podkin for you in as much detail as possible. Can you picture him?
Maths: column subtraction
This week, we’ve moved onto column subtraction in maths.
We used Base 10 in a fun maths game yesterday to represent our subtractions.
The children represented 49 on on their whiteboards with Base 10 (4 tens and 9 ones). They then had to roll a dice and subtract that number from their Base 10 with the aim of getting down to zero. However, this became a problem when they ran out of ones and only had tens left!
They had to exchange 1 ten for 10 ones.
This game allowed the children to really visualise and understand the process of exchanging in column subtraction.
Help at home: use this website (https://www.coolmath4kids.com/manipulatives/base-ten-blocks) to play the game with your children at home.
Science – Sight and the senses.
This week in science, we have been learning about sight and the senses. The children had to work together to match the sense with the receptor. Then we all worked together on an experiment where the children were split into four teams and they had to throw a bean bag into a bucket. We then counted the scores and tried again with one eye closed. The children then discussed the difference in score, linking back to the importance of sight. We were all really impressed with the children’s teamwork, their findings and most of all their throwing skills! We might have some future basketballers (and scientists) on our hands.
Topic – Geography
In Topic this week, we focused on maps. The children learnt what a map is, the importance of them and how to use them. We looked at a map of the world, then a map of our area and then a map of Moortown Primary to show the different scales of maps. Once we had explored this we started to look at keys in maps. The children were then split into groups to identify different human and physical features on a map. They did really well and even taught the teacher about different places in Moortown!
Poetry Picnic
Each week, we will learn a new poem and will recite this poem every day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called Breezy Weather.
Breezy Weather
Breezy weather. Freezy weather.
When the leaves fall, we all fall together.
Breezy weather. Freezy weather.
When the wind blows, we huddle together.
Here’s a video of us performing the poem. Apologies about the shaky camerawork – I can’t record and do actions at the same time!
Science: forces
This half term in Science we have been learning all about forces. This week, we investigated air resistance using bin bags. First, we ran across the Green as fast as we could and recorded our time. Then, we did the same run but this time we held a bin bag above our heads. We found that we ran slower whilst holding the bin bag. We deduced that this must be because when we were holding the binbag it increased the air resistance and therefore slowed us down.
Help at home by discussing the vocabulary (below) that we are using in Science for our forces topic.
Living and Learning: rights and responsibilities
This week, Year 3 have been talking about rights and responsibilities.
The children discussed what rights they have and that these rights come with responsibilities. Here’s what we came up with:
I have the right to learn and go to school. I have the responsibility to help others learn while at school.
I have the right to clean water. I have the responsibility to not waste water.
I have the right to share my religion. I have the responsibility to be respectful about other religions.
I have the right to feel safe. I have the responsibility to make others feel safe.
I have the right to feel happy. I have the responsibility to make others feel happy.
Help at home: What other rights and responsibilities can you think of? See how many you can list with your child!
Questions
This week, we’ve been learning all about questions (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip). We learnt a question is a sentence that ends with a question mark and we discovered that many questions begin with words such as what, who, when, how, why or which.
We then came up with our own questions to ask Giraffe, the main character in our class novel. After writing them down, we had fun playing a game of hot seating. In this activity, the children took turns stepping into the role of Giraffe and answering questions as if they were him.
Help at home: Think of three interesting questions to ask giraffe or another character from the book.
Reading Records
At Moortown, reading records help us to celebrate our love for reading. As a reminder, here is the key information you and your child need to know:
- Each time one of the children signs out a new book to read from the library, they can make note of these in their reading record and rate them out of 5 stars.
- Every Friday, I chose an activity for the whole class to complete in their reading record. More information on these activities is found inside the record.
- The children bring in these reading records every Friday for our Book Club lesson where we’ll discuss their books and develop their love of reading.
- Please accompany your child’s weekly activity with a short comment sharing with us the reading your child has been doing at home.
Take a look at some fabulous activities Year 6 have completed so far:
