The Courier

In Geography this week we talked about when and why we might need map reading skills. We learned about why we have symbols on maps, discussed how to use a key and practised matching real life pictures to map symbols. We then had a chance to explore some local ordnance survey maps, finding different towns, rivers and landmarks using our newly acquired knowledge of symbols and keys. 

At the start of our work on telling the time, it was important  to understand the passage of time and how long seconds, minutes and hours actually are.

The children took part in a carousel of activities, seeing how many of each task they could do in a minute. They covered maths problems, number of pages read, star jumps, throw and catch a ball and throw a beanbag into a hoop. It was noisy, competitive fun and really helped understand time as something that passes rather than purely movement of hands on a clock. 

We've opened the boxes that arrived with our new toys and games and had great fun trying them out - thanks again for our Cake sale donations!

We have come to the part of our Fantastic Mr Fox story where Badger challenges Mr Fox on the moral decisions he has made in stealing food. The children took on the role of Mr Fox and wrote a heartfelt speech on his reasons why he has had to do what he has done.  We enjoyed watching some of them present their speeches - in character, of course!

This week as part of our maths objectives around telling the time, we have also started to understand duration. Class III enjoyed timing each other in simple activities such as building a tower of cubes and counting to 100 as fast as they could!

Mrs Stapleton
Class III Form Tutor

It's been an emotional history lesson for me with Class IV this week. We have been learning about the impact of WW2 on children and have been empathising with evacuees.

The children have begun writing letters in the role of an evacuee, to their loved ones who remained at home. I can't wait to read the completed pieces after next week's lesson and anticipate having to mark them with a box of tissues close by!

I hope to share some of these with you in next week's Courier.

Class VF have been hearing first hand from Mrs Noyce what it is like to work in the NHS. Mrs Noyce has a previous career as a Neonatal Sister at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham. She told the children how the NHS was a place she would describe as 'family', full of 'hope' and 'miraculous'. 

Our Year 5s visited The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park last Friday. It was very exciting to go to the home of modern computing and see how computers have evolved over time.

There was a link with history as the children learned about the work done during World War II at Bletchley Park. It was amazing to see how the people who were there solved some incredibly hard problems.

As well as this, it was great to see these old computers come to life and the children could not believe how long they took to do simple calculations and how much technology has shrunk nowadays. On top of the history, the children honed their skills. They were able to use some BBC computers to do programming and played some old computer games. I felt a sense of nostalgia! Also, they took part in the ‘Turing Test’ to see if they could make a computer seem like it was human. The children behaved impeccably well and were very engaged and enthusiastic.

We are learning about reference texts for the next few weeks. This week the children worked collaboratively to create a class 'wiki' page. If you didn't know wiki means quick, so they had about 30 minutes to find information from a range of books to add to their page; each class chose topic areas to add to.  Our work will develop skills in accuracy of information, working collaboratively and proposing changes to vocabulary and grammar to enhance meaning and clarity. 

Maths has taken a shapely turn this week where children have looked at the properties of polygons to decide on the category of shapes they belong to. We have particularly focused on parallel and perpendicular lines and quadrilaterals. Children have identified them and then tried to draw accurately on grid and isometric dotty paper. It takes a lot of concentration!