On Thursday afternoon, we took part in blind food tasting based on foods the Maya would have eaten. Some of us were a little apprehensive about this due to the unknown. The foods we tried were avocado, chilli, lettuce, dark chocolate and tuna. As you can imagine some of these were a hit and others not so much. However, everyone gave them a try and tried to push themselves outside of their comfort zones.
After having time to work alongside out partners to write speech, it was now time to write speech independently. We watched the video, took note of what was being said and by who before recording this in our books and punctuating it. It was lovely to see some children push themselves to green and experience with having the reporting clause at the start and end of the sentence.
In our book talk, we read the text and started to unpick the vocabulary. This supports our comprehension of the text. We read around the word and used the root word to help us determine the definition. Once we knew what the word meant, we text marked this and record it on the vocabulary wall.
Today was our Science hook week lesson where we started to explore states of matter. We started to understand the properties of solid, liquid and gas. In small groups, we had the opportunity to sort some images into the 3 categories.
In our writing lesson today, we had the opportunity to start creating a bank of speech that we could use in our writing along with our shoulder partners. We have become more confident with being able more the reporting clause. In our next lesson, we’ll work more independently to demonstrate our ability to punctuate direct speech
After starting to look at the Mayan timeline in History, we learned about the different masks that were worn by this civilisation. We learned that some masks were worn for celebrations, battle and even in death. Then we had an opportunity to design and create our own masks using known Maya masks as a template.
Our hook week started with us learning about the skills needed to be a historian and starting to learn some information about the Maya.
As part of this, we looked at the timeline and ordering key events. We had a reminder about the correct way to order based on BC and AD.
For BC, we order in descending order whereas for AD, we order in ascending order.
Today, we started our grammar sessions before we start our next piece of writing. One of our activities was to note down things we could notice in a passage of writing. It was great to see that we could identify lots of different features.
We have been looking at months of the year in French. We began by trying to find the matching pair to the word cards on our tables using a silent conversation protocol. One person had the English word and the other person had the French translation for months of the year. We discussed how we knew we had found the correct pair and we used our existing knowledge as well as identifying cognates for some of the months.
We watched a video and listened carefully to each of the months in French. If we heard our birthday month we had to stand up.
We then used the iPads to research various different important events that happen in France. We had to find out the month that the events usually happen and write this down using the French spelling. Just like days of the week, French months do not need capital letters at the beginning.
We finished off by learning how to ask and answer ‘when is your birthday?’ in French. We discussed with our partners and then shared the information we had found with the rest of the crew and confirmed whether this information was correct.
During this lesson, we investigated French days of the week. We looked at the written days of the week and tried to identify which day was which based on any clues we could get from the spelling. We found some slight similarities in terms of some spelling, initial letters and pronunciation when they were said out loud to us.
We noticed that, unlike in English, the days of the week are not given capital letters in French. So that we could practise pronunciation and order, we listened to and began to learn a days of the week song set to a familiar tune ‘Camptown Races’.
We finished by looking at the French translations for yesterday, today and tomorrow. We practised our pronunciation by using sentence stems to create conversations in pairs.
