English

This term we looked at the story The Tin Forest about a man who wishes he lived in a jungle. We talked about how the old man in the story felt at different points and wrote diary entries from his point of view. We also looked closely at the language in the story and create different performances to understand it better. Finally, we wrote a description of the forest after it had been transformed into a living one and thought about the descriptive language we could use to build atmosphere.

Maths

For maths we have been focusing on place value including thousands, hundreds, tens and ones. We looked at ordering numbers and rounding them to help us estimate answers. We then looked at column addition and subtraction including time where we needed to carry or exchange. We used place value coins often to help us with the more difficult problems.

Art

For art we looked at the artist Henri Rousseau. We focused on the composition of his paintings and how most have jungle animals in the centre with vegetation around it. We then planned and created our own paintings using acrylic paint like Rousseau.

DT

For our DT this half-term, we have created our own Tin Forests like the one built in our English story. We used a wide range of different materials to make our forests including: tinfoil, lollypop sticks, silver card and more. We worked in pairs and used teamwork to create our brilliant ideas. After reading more of our story we found out that real animals and plants had started to make a home in the old man’s tin forest. Using different coloured card, we have included the real animals and plant in our tin forests too.

Geography

In geography we have been looking at the enquiry Beyond the Magic Kingdom: What is the Sunshine State Really Like? We started by looking at the Magic Kingdom theme park in Florida and why it is so popular. We then expanded our enquiry into the geographical features of Florida and why people, choose to go on holiday there. Finally, we looked at how humans are endangering turtle populations in Florida and wrote a short persuasive text to persuade other to help look after turtles.

PE

For PE we looked at our basic ball control skills including throwing and catching a basketball in different ways, passing a football and how to dribble them effectively. We then applied these skills to different games to practise and improve them.

PSHCE

This term our PSHCE focus was on Being Me in My World. We looked at how to work effectively as a team and roles we and others play in school. We also talked about what rules we wanted to have in our classroom and created our Class Charter.

RE

In RE we looked at the question ‘Is it possible for everyone to be happy?’. We talked about what makes ourselves and others happy and what can cause us to be unhappy. We then looked at the story of the Buddha and what he taught about happiness and what happiness means to Buddhists today. Finally, we made a happiness box. Around it we wrote what we and Buddhists think about happiness. Inside our box we then wrote a way we could make others happy.

Science

During science this term we have looked at states of matter. We started by looking at what the 3 states of matter are and their properties. We then looked at how these states of matter can be changed and performed different experiments to observe these changes. We also looked at the water cycle and why it rains.

Music

This half term Hogwarts have been listening to different genres of music. We discussed our favourite genres and chatted about who plays music in our house and where we hear different genres of music being played.

https://youtu.be/-jDR14y19fQ – This is a link to a YouTube video where a talented musician plays ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ in the different styles through the decades.

Each week in our music session we listened to different genre of music  noting who the artists were. When listening to Chinese Music we also listened to a clip of music from the film ‘Lady and The Tramp’ – We are Siamese (If you please)

In our collection of classroom percussion we looked to see which were from Africa.

We then looked at the famous English Band The Beatles and listened to some of their most famous Pop Songs.