To celebrate Children In Need, everyone who came to school and made a donation was able to take part in splatting Titch in the face with a whipped cream ‘pie’! It’s safe to say, everyone had fun! Even some of the adults joined in!
The last thing we needed to learn before moving on to our writing sessions was how to join two independent clauses together. We learned all about coordinating conjunctions, known as FANBOYS – for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so. We then worked through a few example sentences in which we had to identify which conjunction had been used. Once we’d identified this, we looked at the independent clauses either side of the conjunction. We identified each verb and subject, allowing us to see how we had two independent clauses with a subject and a verb joined together with one of the FANBOY conjunctions. We also learned that these conjunctions can be used to join more than one subject together to create a compound subject (for example, The moon and the stars).
Crew Hamill have tried really hard to develop their knowledge of verbs, subjects and leftovers by identifying them within paragraphs. We have been looking at unpunctuated paragraphs, with no capital letters, commas and full stops, and have used our knowledge of independent clauses having a subject and a verb to be able to work our where the punctuation belongs. We have found this tricky at times due to some of the vocabulary being difficult to understand but after working on it for a while, we are now much more confident!
Crew Hamill really enjoyed taking part in the interactive World Kindness Day assembly last week. We were really inspired by the stories we were told by the host and we have used this to reflect on our Be Kind HoWL. We have created ‘Kindness Balloons’ in our crew and will be adding a balloon every time someone does something kind. We’re hoping to have enough to make our house fly, like in Up! We also completed kindness tickets in which we wrote a note to someone who was important to us, explaining why we thought they were amazing.
In XP outdoors today the children made their initials using twigs, string and wool. First they looked for twigs and then they got the string to tie all the pieces into place for their initial. After that they then got some wool and made it look pretty.
Today, Crew Hamill began looking at mechanisms. We began our lesson by testing our sticky knowledge and recapping previous learning. Following this, Miss Hamill introduced us to some new vocabulary that we would need to understand in order to access our lesson. We then had to look at pictures of different objects and decide which mechanism was being used with each one (E.g. a pulley for a flag pole). We then watched some informative videos about pulleys, lever and gears, making notes on big pieces of chotting paper in mini crews as we did so. Once we’d gathered all of our information, we inputted this onto a Padlet to keep a record of what we had learned.
Today, we looked at what happens when you are building single-sentence clauses but you have ‘leftovers’ that could belong to either clause you are creating. We followed our script to identify verbs and subjects, then labelled the leftovers that were easier to identify (the leftover at the end belonging to the second clause). We then looked at how the leftover in the middle could belong to either clause. It could be the ending of the first clause, adding extra information, or it could be used at the beginning of the second clause with a comma being used after it. We had a go at doing this in pairs and playing around with the structure of our clauses before completing our exit ticket to illustrate what we had learned.
Today, we continued to activate our inference skills by looking at a poem. We were introduced to the poem yesterday and worked hard to pull the text apart, identifying key vocabulary and labelling the text with key information and notes that we felt were helpful in our mission to understand poetry and what they poem was actually about. We then used these notes today to delve deeper into inferring the feelings of the characters. We began by working as a crew to identify the key points in the text for the first character, Chloe, and discussed how we thought she was feeling at each of these points. We used evidence from the text to support our ideas (E.g. she was happy at the beginning because she was looking out into space with open eyes). We then created a line graph to detail our findings. Following this, we worked in pairs to do the same for the second character, Max. Once we’d done this, we brought both graphs together to compare their feelings throughout the poem. We identified that Max was a much happier, more positive character, whilst Chloe was much less positive as she worried a lot and was scared by the idea of adventure.
We moved on from air resistance to start looking at another type of friction – water resistance. We built our background knowledge by watching a few informative videos and reading some key information to help us understand that water resistance is a type of force that uses friction to slow things down that are moving through water. Once we’d learned that the shape of an object in water can impact on the amount of water resistance, we tested our hypothesis that thinner, more streamlined shapes, would travel quicker through the water than wider shapes with a larger surface area. We worked in pairs to create two different shapes using plasticine and then conducted an experiment in which we dropped each shape, at the same time, into a jar that contained the same amount of water. We tested these shapes a few times before recording our results and concluding whether or not our hypothesis was correct. We were pleased to discover that we were correct!
We continued to identify leftovers (parts of our clause that are not a subject or a verb) during our grammar lesson on Monday. However, we discussed how the sequence we had been spotting during the last few lessons (subject, verb, leftovers) doesn’t always apply and it will not be like that in every single clause we write. As such, we looked at a few examples of where the positioning of these differed. We made sure we followed our script which required us to identify the verb first, then the subject, then the leftovers in order to label these accurately.
