Welcome back!

Happy new year to you all!  I hope you all had a lovely break, the children have enjoyed telling me all about their Christmas holidays.  I have been so impressed with the attitude that children have come back to school with, we went straight back into our learning and everyone has worked so hard.

Money, Money, Money! 

In maths we have been focusing on calculations with money and solving problems, linking it to real life contexts at every opportunity.  We have also been linking this to work on decimal numbers.  Children can consolidate this learning in the new homework books (Pg 48/49 for Year 4 children and pg 36/37 for Year 5)

Mexico

We have kicked off our topic about Mexico by locating key physical features of the country.  Using the rainforest as a stimulus for our English, we have been using a short animated film about hunting animals.  The film has certainly captured the children’s writing imaginations and the creativity of their writing and the language used this week has been some of the best I have seen.  As myself and Mr Wainwright said, this was their cold pieces – we can’t wait to read the warm writing! 

Using the film has also helped us to practise punctuating dialogue between the characters for our grammar learning this week. Children can consolidate this learning in the homework books (pg 60/61 for Year 4 children and pg 62/63 for Year 5)

Our music lesson this week saw children enjoying the energy of Mexican music!!  I certainly saw a few interesting dance moves as children sang and accompanied Mexican songs with various percussion instruments.

Continuing on the theme of dance, we moved down to South America for our dance this week where we practised our samba steps.  I look forward to seeing these steps perfected in routines over the coming weeks. 

Active Learn

As last term, the children have got updated Active Learn accounts with games relevant to our maths, spelling and grammar learning.  Bug Club books have been allocated and we now have a new ‘Bug Club Champion’ award that will be allocated each week in class.  As a class, we are all working on developing our comprehension of texts and our written responses to questions about texts.  The allocated bug club books really are an excellent resource to support this so please encourage your child to answer the questions carefully.  All the responses come directly to me and I can respond to written questions which helps inform my planning for the teaching of reading.  

Well, after a fabulous but busy first week back I hope you all have a happy, restful weekend.