Blwyddyn Newydd Dda! Happy New Year!  

We have started the new year with a bang! We have enjoyed seeing the progress that we have made as a result of our hard work last term. We are pleased to see that we are becoming a strong team unit and are all benefiting socially, emotionally and in terms of our work. Although we have made lots of progress over the last term with this we will continue to develop these skills and further strengthen our relationship with each other.  

We have enjoyed our sport education sessions where we are really putting our collaboration and skills of working with others to the test. We have created our own mini league in which we work. We have bonded well with our new team mates, creating our own team names and logos prior to any games. We have also created a class success criteria which we gain point for throughout the sessions.  We have enjoyed developing ball skills through Netball and sportsmanship.  

January has seen us developing our multiplication skills. We have loved playing the ‘Follow Me’ cards and timing ourselves to see how quickly we can recall our tables. Even Miss Evans has got super excited when we have beaten our record! This has helped us when we have been solving multi step problems which have included multiplication calculations.  

We have enjoyed researching, reading and watching videos about Fair trade. We have created Clips on the iPads to explain whet we have found out. We have also edited our written explanations of where chocolate comes from, using the mark-up tool on the iPad camera. For this we had to look back at what we had written and use the check list to mark off the feature included in our writing. We then used the mark-up tool to change, add in, edit, take out and reword things to improve on our work.  

We thoroughly enjoyed finding out about wearable technology and designing our own wearable tech that would improve lives in the future. We were fascinated to find out that the tech we use everyday didn’t always exist. We enjoyed watching videos explaining how quickly technology changes and develops , especially the Microsoft video which shows some of the technology of the future.  

Reading has been a big focus this month. We have started establishing a good routine for reading for pleasure. Lots of us have found some great novels, fact books and newspapers in class whilst others have chosen to bring reading materials in from home. We have started to create our own class book-review book. This book is hopefully going to help us to ‘sell’ our favourite reads to our friends.   

During our outdoor sessions we have talked lots about gratitude. We have discussed what it means to be grateful and how we show our gratitude, and how it feels to show it and to be included in the gratitude. We have also briefly discussed the difference between needs and wants and how can effect our gratitude. As a result of this we have created our own class Gratitude Tree in the forest area, where we have written down the things we are most grateful for on big leaf printouts and hung them on one of the lovely trees.