What a fantastic way to kick start our sport week with a GB Freestyler Kayaker! Becky Green inspired children this morning with her passion for kayaking, at such a young age she has achieved so much! Our children practised some key skills and exercises to get their bodies moving.
In arithmetic, we have worked hard to ensure we are using the squares in our maths books accurately, ensuring there is one number in each square. We have also worked hard to ensure all of our numbers are formed correctly, a ruler is used to draw any lines and we use appropriate spaces between calculations so that we can read our work properly and it is presented to the best of our ability. We focused on addition of 3 digit numbers with exchanging and some of us were even able to move on to four and five digit numbers!
Today, Crew Hamill continued with their new writing genre: a character description. In this lesson we identified as much information about Augustus Gloop in order to be able to write a description about his appearance and his personality/attitude. We started our BBK by writing down everything we already knew about him, recalling information from our reading lessons (in which we focused on a poem all about him) and from our previous writing lessons (in which we wrote a narrative based on a short section of the film). We then watched some clips of Augustus from the film and used the to add further information to our BBK. Finally, we looked at some different images of Augustus at different points throughout the film and really drew our attention to his appearance so that we could add even more information and create a bank of vocabulary about his key features: eyes, mouth, hair and clothes. We are going to use all of this information in our writing next week to help us describe him in detail!
This week, Crew Hamill have begun to focus on non-fiction texts in our reading session. We focused on a double page spread from an information book all about the Mayans which links to our expedition. We began by discussion how we knew what this text was going to be about, drawing attention to the title of the double page spread: What happened to the Maya? We then continued with our focus of reading for accuracy and have used our rulers to guide our eyes as to the line we are reading and our fingers to guide to each word. We have practiced reading aloud as well as reading in our heads. Additionally, we have used our text marking skills to identify key vocabulary, key information and things that we find interesting, surprising or a connection to. We tested our recall of the vocabulary we identified by walking around the room and matching our vocabulary words to their definitions. We found some of these a bit tricky but were able to complete this successfully. We have also answered some vocabulary and retrieval questions with our talk partners to delve a little deeper into what we have read.
Today, we were very lucky to take part in a wonderful experience brought to us by M&M productions, The Jungle Book. Many of us knew the story of Mowgli and it was fantastic to see the story brought to life!
Crew Hamill had so much fun at Scotty’s yesterday! We were taught all about the triangle of requirements for a successful fire heat, oxygen and fuel. He then showed us how to build our own fire pit and how to use a cotton wool ball and a flint to generate a fire. We all got to have a go using the flint which we found exciting! Although a few of us managed to generate a spark, we weren’t as successful as the leader at getting the fire started – he did it first time, every time! We then used the skills he taught us to add sticks to the flame to begin building the fire. We didn’t manage to keep the fire going for long but we’re hoping to extend our skills next week to see if we can keep it going for longer and build it even bigger.
Crew Hamill have worked extremely hard over the last two weeks to improve their handwriting. On Friday, we stripped things right back to focusing on each letter of the alphabet and how to write this cursively. We then worked through handwriting sheets that had been made on the yellow lines we use to support our writing in writing lessons. Miss Hamill also gave us a set of these sheets to take home for homework so that we have even more practise of cursive!
Following our success with reading time on an analogue clock, Crew Hamill moved on to look at digital clocks. We discussed how we could find these in lots of places – on some watches, our phones, microwaves, ovens… We then looked at how to read a digital clock properly and what each of the digits means. Following this, we used our new knowledge to correctly match analogue clocks to digital clocks as well as the time in words.
On Friday, Crew Hamill started their demo comp lesson by finding our vocabulary words from around the room and matching them to a sheet of definitions. We then worked as a crew to answer a guided demonstration question which was also focused on vocabulary. Following this, we used the skills we had learned in the guided question to work in pairs to answer two questions independently.
This week, Crew Hamill have continued their poetry focus by looking at a poem about Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. This helped us to compare and contrast her character to Augustus Gloop who we looked at last week. Our fluency focus this week has been on accuracy – ensuring we are following the text properly. We magpied some brilliant reading ideas from Crew Shields and Crew MI to help us with this. We learned how to use our rulers to move from line to line in the text, ensuring we didn’t miss any out which would impact on how fluently we read (thanks, Crew Shields!). We also accurately followed the individual words with our fingers which allowed us to keep up with where we were in the text (thanks, Crew MI!) After reading through the text several times, we have looked at answering questions with Miss Hamill and in Talk Partners. Our focus this week has been on vocabulary in order to prepare us for our assessments next week!
