What a great month we’ve all had in Year 5/4! Lots of developing new skills, reading, problem solving, artwork, dancing, The Gunpowder Plot, Remembrance Day, Anti-bullying week and more! We continued with our theme of ‘Belong’, with lots of our learning inspired by the book, King of the Sky by Nicola Davis.
I was super impressed with the amazing refugee presentations, delivered with confidence and enthusiasm. Well done all! I can see that a lot of research went into this project and we’ve all learnt so much from it. The weekly Welsh and English guided reading sessions are going very well and we can see lots of progress being made. Lots of great work on spellings, punctuation and conjunctions. With the theme of ‘Belonging’ in mind, the children planned and wrote some fabulous stories. We also studied examples of story starters so that we can become better authors. In order to thank Mr Evans for taking the time to talk to us about pigeon fancying, we wrote lovely ‘thank you’ letters.
November saw the introduction of Bar Modelling in maths. A bar model is a pictorial representation of a problem or concept where bars of boxes are used to represent the known and unknown quantities. Every day we worked on a variety of bar modelling questions. See our twitter feed for examples – BARVEMBER. Everyone enjoyed the NRICH problem solving activities too. The children have been developing their understanding of division. They have used the inverse operation (multiplication) to work out questions. They have also used the ‘bus stop’ method (formal method) to work out questions, including those with remainders. The children have revised multiplication. They have worked on multiplying by 1 and 0; multiplying three digits; 9 x tables. They have also enjoyed using Sumdog to practise many mathematical skills.
With many new restrictions due to Covid, it is more important than ever that the children are confident with using Hwb. Videos have been uploaded; shared files accessed and edited; J2 Office present was used for the refugee presentation; good use of J2 Blast and J2 message. J2 Office Writer was used to present the comparison studies of Wales and Italy. It was also used to create anti-bullying posters.
So that we can develop ourselves as independent learners, we’ve been focussing on self-evaluating our work and making corrections and improvements.
Our school values this month were ‘Trust’ and ‘Caring’. Many of our class assemblies focussed on these values, and inspired interesting class discussions. We’ve also been thinking about our worries and what we can do to stop ourselves from worrying. We now have a class song to help with this and never fails to make us smile – Bob Marley, Don’t worry about a thing.
Our new theme of ‘Believe’ has now started. In response to the children’s suggestions, we are learning about the Hindu festival of Diwali. They have enjoyed dancing, yoga, listening to the story of Rama and Sita, painting mehndi designs, looking for symmetry in rangoli patterns and made beautiful diva lamps. We will also be finding out about the Jewish festival of Hanukkah and the true meaning of Christmas.
