Today in book talk, we delved deeper into our text for this week – Wailing Winnie’s Carboot Sale. We used our fastest finger first skills and had a think in our pairs to find the answers to some questions related to the text. We loved reading about Winnie accidentally selling her husband’s pair of old, smelly trainers and the mission she had to go on to get them back.
We have been continuing with our music unit ‘Latin Dance’. We warmed up by practising the salsa step we looked at during our last lesson, we then learnt a new step and practised dancing both of them together.
We looked at keeping the beat of our song using untuned percussion instruments. We talked about, and then applied, crotchets and quavers using the instruments. Once we were confident with keeping the beat, we then added vocals and began to sing the song whilst playing.
We were introduced to chords, when you play two or more notes at the same time. Working with a partner, we tried playing the chords for A minor and F major on the glockenspiels. We found it tricky at first to play the correct notes at the same time as our partner, but we showed resilience and continued to practise keeping in time with one another. We then split into two groups, one playing A minor, the other playing F major at the same time. We thought it sounded really good when we all fell into the same time. We finished off this part of the lesson by continuing to learn the song lyrics, thinking about the melody and where we needed to clap.
Finally, we recapped the notes B, A and G on the recorder, and applied this to a short tune where we had to move between the 3 notes seamlessly.
We have started a new unit of music called ‘Latin Dance’. We started by learning the basic steps of salsa dancing, making sure that we kept the rhythm so that we all did the correct steps at the same time.
We then discussed that different songs are structured in different ways. We listened to our song ‘Latin Dance’ and identified how the song is structured. Once we had recognised the structure, we began finding the beat of the bar, adding some basic footwork from the basic steps we looked at at the beginning of the lesson. We then added in a further action on beat 1 to represent a two quavers (jogging duration).
We finished off the lesson by beginning to learn the chorus.
We then continued to learn how to play the recorder, this lesson we were introduced to the note ‘G’.
We worked in mini crews to put chunks of sentences together in order to create full sentences that included a subordinate clause (a clause that does not make sense on its own). The sentences we created were:
We discussed which part of these sentences was the main clause and which part was the subordinate. We also discussed whether our sentences could be put in a different order and still make sense.
Some of Crew Hamill were lucky enough to be chosen to take part in a boxing class this afternoon. We had so much fun and Miss Hamill was super impressed with how strong our punching skills were!
Crew Hamill have been learning how to add measurements this week and we consolidating our learning today by finding measurements around the room and using the column method to add them together. We worked really hard on ensuring our columns lined up and that we could add the measurements accurately, starting with our ones. Some of us even challenged ourselves to add metres and centimetres, converting between the two!
Today, Crew Hamill visited our library to change our reading for pleasure books. We loved being able to explore the range of different books available for us to choose. We then spent a relaxing 5 minutes in the library reading the books we had chosen.
Today, Crew Hamill began exploring their new writing unit that is focused on a clip from the film Ice Age. We began by looking at snapshots from the film and discussing notices, feelings and wonders that we had from them. After this, we watched the section of the clip that we are going to retell in a narrative and then ordered the snapshots from the clip to help us verbally retell the story.
In grammar, Crew Hamill learned all about determiners. To begin our lesson, we discussed the difference between vowels and consonants and identified this in mini crews. This helped us to decide which determiner to use before each of our vowels. We learned that if the word begins with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) then we must use an as a determiner and if it begins with a consonant (any of the other 21 letters) we must use a. We also learned about exceptions to this rule – e.g. hour. Even though this starts with a consonant, it actually makes a vowel sound so we would have to use an.
Today, Crew Hamill consolidated their learning on millimetres, centimetres and metres by working in mini crews to match up measurements. We recapped how to convert between the measurements and this helped us to match them accurately.
