Welcome to the home page for the first half of the Autumn term 2024. There is something special about the start of a new school year; new classrooms; new topics and new friendships. This page will give you a flavour of our learning this half term.
Week 3 and Week 4
Our learning over the last two weeks has involved diving deeper into our topic areas. We have settled into our new space and routines and have enjoyed getting to know each other a bit better through working together.
We started a new unit in English which is inspired by the book Straw into Gold by Hilary McKay. The author has taken well-known fairy tales and rewritten them by writing from the perspective of a different main character or with a different plot outcome. We started off by reading the new version of Rumpelstiltskin and comparing it to an animated version of the traditional tale. We pulled out information about the main character and looked at how the author used expanded noun phrases and prepositional phrases to describe the setting.
We then practised using some of the sentence constructions the author used in the story to describe both the setting and characters. This involved generating banks of vocabulary we could use to create exciting and engaging sentences.
In maths, we extended our place value knowledge by comparing and ordering numbers; exploring using powers of 10 and rounding. We continued to explore the helpful apparatus which could help us with these areas of maths including place value charts, Gattengo charts and place value counters.
We have lots of budding rap stars in the class who enjoyed the singing element of our music lessons this half term. We learnt a ‘space rap’ all about the sun and solar system which was not only fun, but taught us some facts about the sun. The children enjoyed it so much that they performed it in our celebration assembly! Continuing on the space theme, we listened to a few pieces of planet suite composed by Gustav Holst and thought about how he had represented the dynamics of the planet using different instruments, tempo and pitch. During our next lesson, we used photographs of space as inspiration to compose our own short pieces of music using percussion instruments.
In our science lessons, we explored how our understanding of the Solar System has changed over time by looking at the ideas of key scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and philosophers including Alhazen, Copernicus, Aristotle and Galilei. We discovered that different civilisations interpreted what they could see in the sky but that thinking changed as new theories were put forward and technology improved.
In other news, we are very pleased to announce that Harry-Vegas (Etna), Lucy (Vesuvius) and Aria (Stromboli) have been elected as the House Captains for our school teams. We also held our School Council elections and enjoyed listening to the persuasive speeches the interested candidates had prepared. A very well done to Arthur (Year 5) and Lola-Rose (Year 6) were elected as our Class School Council Representatives.
Week 1 and Week 2
Welcome to the new school year!
It was lovely to welcome the children back to school on Wednesday 4th September and say ‘hello’ to some new faces as well. The children enjoyed exploring our new classroom and school building as well as seeing the changes in Villa V in our old classrooms.
We wasted no time with getting stuck into our learning and finding out about the new topics we would be studying through this first half of the autumn term.
In the first full week, we planned and wrote a creative piece of writing based on the wordless picture book Flotsam. We explored real pieces of flotsam, discussed the difference between flotsam and jetsam, and made predictions about the story-based o the front cover. We then ‘read’ the story by looking at the beautiful illustrations and discussing what we thought was happening in the plot. The children came up with some excellent ideas about different narrative writing approaches they could take in response to the events in the story. The children went on to write their chosen story. It’s been wonderful to see such enthusiastic writers.
At the beginning of the year, revisiting our understanding of place value is an important part of maths. We started off with revisiting Roman Numerals to 1000 and used this knowledge to problem solve. We then explored numbers to 1,000,000 (Year 5) and 10,000,000 (Year 6) through understanding the value of each digit in a number; partitioning and comparing numbers. Alongside this, we have been developing our mental arithmetic skills through daily practice.
Our science topic this half term didn’t fail to get everyone excited; we are learning about Earth and Space. It was a fantastic start as everyone seemed to have an amazing fact about space that they knew already. We began by exploring and naming the planets in the solar system before going outside and creating a scale model of the planets using spherical items such as a melon, blueberry and a peppercorn! This helped us to visually understand just how large the solar system really is.
Our main overarching topic for this half term is based on Ancient China and specifically the Shang Dynasty. We started our history lessons by understanding the vocabulary related to the topic and then plotting a timeline of the main Chinese dynasties. It was interesting to compare where this period fits into our knowledge of other historical periods we have studies such as the Romans, Ancient Egyptians and the stone, iron and bronze ages.
It’s been a very fun two weeks and we are very proud to experience the enthusiasm and interest the children have in their learning at the start of the new term; we have a fantastic year ahead!