Experience Day – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have loved sinking their teeth into their new writing genre this week! We have begun a narrative on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and after spending a few grammar days focusing on speech in order to be able to include this in our retelling of the story, we have today begun to focus on the section of the film we will be writing about. We began by watching a short clip that was taken from the film, where Charlie and the rest of the Golden Ticket winners enter the room of all things edible! We then recalled what we had watched by sequencing a range of pictures from the clip. Finally, we worked as a crew to chot down lots of vocabulary based on what we had seen. We have created an anchor chart full of brilliant vocabulary words that we can use to really make our writing stand out.

States of Matter

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

We continued our hook week learning by becoming scientists! We discussed that being a scientist means that we gather and use information to make observations and create conclusions and explanations in order to understand our world and how it works. We were then introduced to the States of Matter – Solids, Liquids and Gases. We discussed what each of these were and their main properties before organising different materials based on their state of matter. It was interesting to discover the amount of different solids, liquids and gases we come across in every day life!

Book Talk and Demo Comp

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have enjoyed starting a new book in reading lessons this week – A celebration on Planet Zox. This book reintroduced us to some of our favourite characters from previous books we have read and then introduced us to some of their family. We loved being able to make links to our previous learning! We began by making predictions on what we thought the book might be about, thinking perhaps there was a birthday party due to the word “celebration” in the title. We then explored more of the complex vocabulary within the book, identify their definitions. Following this, we completed a book talk lesson in which we answered questions about the book, using Fastest Finger and Have a Think skills. For demo comp, we have moved away from retrieval as this was a huge focus for last half term and is something we are much stronger at now. We have begun to look at inference questions and learned all about identifying clues within the text in order to provide answers. We worked together to pull the questions apart and search through our books for the clues. Once we had identified these, we had a great discussion on what this information was able to tell us and how we could use it to provide a detailed answer. We can’t wait to use these skills tomorrow in our independent comprehension.

Maya Masks

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill continued being historians by learning all about Ancient Maya Masks. We learned that masks had a central role in Maya culture and that they were made for a variety of reasons – events, death and even to decorate temples! We used the information we learned to then design and create our own Maya mask.

Crew Hamill and Crew Thompson – Music

16th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

We have continued our work on ‘Latin Dance’ this week by recapping information about Cuban music and how it is influenced. We then practised finding and maintaining a 2-3 clave rhythm, and a 3-2 clave rhythm using untuned percussion instruments. We then applied these rhythms to some traditional Cuban pieces of music.

We practised our piece ‘Latin Dance’, reviewing the lyrics and reminding ourselves of the structure of the piece. We noticed that there were two instrumental parts within the song and we decided to create our own Cuban rhythms to add to the existing instrumental parts.

Once we were happy with our rhythms, we practised the song as a whole, making sure that we were following our conductor to make sure we kept in time with each other and the backing track.

Maya Timeline

16th April 2024Laura Hamill

We kicked off hook week by learning what is was to be a historian and the skills people need to research things from the past. We then began learning some information about Maya.

As part of this learning, we worked in mini crews to order key events into a timeline, with a reminder of BC and AD to ensure we ordered them correctly.

Did you know that when you order BC numbers go in descending order but when you order AD numbers they go in ascending order?

Crew Hamill, Crew Thompson and Crew Mcloughlin – French

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

During this lesson, we used our knowledge of French numbers up to 12 to play French outdoor games on the playground! We discussed the French for common phrases such as your turn, my turn, winner, and miss a turn before heading out!

First, in small groups we had to use a diagram to draw out our game area. This game ‘la marelle’ was similar to hopscotch. We used chalk to draw out the game area before taking it in turns to throw the rock to a number. We had to call out the number 1 in French before skipping to the end of the grid ‘le ciel’ (the sky), coming back to ‘la terre’ (the earth) and collecting the rock to pass on to the next person, saying à toi (your turn). The next person then had to throw the rock on to the next number and repeat the same process. If the player did not roll the rock onto the correct number they had to shout ‘manque’ to show they were missing a turn. The winner ‘gagne’ was the first person to accurately throw the rock to number 10 and move along the game area to get to ‘le ciel’.

Crew Hamill, Crew Thompson and Crew Mcloughlin – French

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

This lesson we were looking at the skill of being able to read numbers 1-12 in French.

We used word cards for the numbers 1-12 to try and put them in the correct order.

We then discussed how to talk about and ask ‘how many?’ in French. We practised our pronunciation and understanding by turning over unknown picture cards and asking ‘Il y a combien?’ after counting in French, our partner then had to find the corresponding written number card to create a pair.

Crew Hamill, Crew Thompson and Crew Mcloughlin – French

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

In French we have been looking at how to say our ages, as well as ask other people how old they are. We started by becoming language detectives, identifying areas of French that we already knew or could find cognates/near cognates for within a letter. We discussed what we could find out from the letter and key questions that had been asked. This helped us with working out particular phrases useful to our lesson.

We then looked at how to say ‘I am ____ years old’ in French. We added an amount of candles to the image on the board and practised the pronunciation of the phrase ‘J’ai _____ ans’. We then looked at how to ask someone how old they are in French before asking and answering the questions using our new French knowledge.

We then played some games where we had to listen carefully to either our teacher or our crew members to identify what they were telling us.

Crew Hamill and Crew Thompson – Music

14th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

We continued with our work on ‘Latin Dance’ by learning about Cuban music and where it gets its influences from. We discussed how it uses a special rhythm called the clave rhythm and we used untuned percussion instruments to find the clave rhythm to a song called ‘El manisero (The Peanut Vendor)’.

We then used glockenspiels to practise the A minor and F major chords. Our final performance is going to be a whole class arrangement of ‘Latin Dance’ so we practised adding the chords in alongside singing the lyrics with the backing track. We thought about what we needed to do to make it even better during the next lesson!