Hello, I hope you have all had a lovely week.
Literacy
In literacy we have been putting a lot of work into our descriptive writing, focusing mainly on ‘setting the scene’ (describing the setting). This week we used these skills and moved on to ‘Characterization’, where we describe a character’s appearance, personality and any other traits they have. We were delighted to use Hagrid as our character to describe. We were focusing on using ‘WOW’ words and phrases for this. For example; ‘he had a grizzly, matted beard’, ‘Hagrid is like a gentle giant’ and ‘his voice was booming like thunder’. We created a character profile for Hagrid that will help us next week with our descriptive writing.
In reading we focused on picking out key information. This helped us create concise summaries of our reading books so far. We also practised highlighting key information in a passage and taking notes in our own words. We used mind maps and bullet points to do this. We then used our notes to create a fact file. Picking out the important information and note taking are skills we will continue to work on.
Things to do at home –
See the progress record for this week’s reading pages. Try summarising the main events of what you read to someone at home, focusing on key events
Think about how the characters are described in your reading books (school or personal). Can you picture them in your head? What good wow words and phrases did the author use to describe them?
Please see spelling document posted on Monday
Maths and Numeracy
This week in maths we have been focusing on mental addition strategies. We have been working through a variety of addition sums and discussing how we got the answer. For example, 46 + 51, we borrowed the 1 and added it to the 46, which then became 47 + 50. This made the calculation much simpler for us to do in our heads. We then made posters explaining out mental addition strategies.
For spelling this week we focused on the names of shapes.
Things to do at home –
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/7-11-years/place-value
Practise adding two values together in your head (these can be numbers that you see or make up). Think about the strategy that you used to get the answer. Challenge yourself with the numbers that you use
Other curricular areas
- For our Free the Forest topic and science, we became experts on different plants that can be found in the rainforest. We worked in small groups and researched the plant, focusing on why is grows in that climate, and created posters to present to the class to teach them about each plant
- In French we researched France itself. We looked for the capital city, monuments, holiday destinations and population
- For art we continued looking at Henri Rousseau’s art. We use his ‘Tiger in a Tropical Storm’ painting as inspiration. We used collage to create our own versions of this famous painting, focusing on creating depth and layers
Have a great weekend!
Miss Mangan
Buckstone Primary School 