It’s been a busy week for us this week but don’t just take my word for it! Here’s what the crew thinks of it…
Category : Curriculum
Islamic Prayer
In Re, we learned about the prayer practice of Islam. These are Wudu, facing Makkah, preparing the mind, praying solo or with others and finally recording set words. We discussed each practice and why this was important for prayer. It was great to see the children asking questions to help their understanding. We used the Islamic prayer to highlight words that described Allah. We linked this to our British Values and how we should show respect and tolerance to others with different religious beliefs to our own.
Demo Comp
In our demo comp, we have been discussing the expectations when answering an inference question. This is a huge area for development for us this half term and we are starting to get the hang of answering these questions and ensuring we provide enough detail to answer the question.
Writing experience day
In preparation for our next plot point, we were delighted to spend a lesson tasting different types of sweets. These sweets would trigger different taste buds on our tongue and allow us to create a bank of vocabulary that will support our writing. Lots of funny faces pulled especially with the sour and fizzy sweets.
Mayan Hierarchy
As with our society, the Mayans had a hierarchy that consisted of The King or High Priest followed by the council (priesthood). Next there were the nobles who were the wealthiest and most powerful. This was followed by the merchants and Artisans who were known as commoners but they didn’t have as hard a life and had better jobs. Finally there were the commoners who were the lowest class and had no rights. They were also referred to as slaves.
We compared this with the hierarchy that we have in the country, our homes and even in school.
As with our previous lesson, we were able to do some additional reading because we had to get our information to help us understand each social class.
What were the Mayans known for?
This week we have been exploring the Mayans and learning about what they were known for. This was a perfect opportunity to do some additional reading as we had lots of information to read so we could highlight the key information.
Once we had collected our information, we started to create posters that shared these facts.
We were surprised to learn that the Mayans had an 18 month calendar and they had various gods who were responsible for a range of things such as war, sun and rain.
Book Talk and Fluency
In our book talk session, we’ve been focusing heavily on how to answer inference questions and thinking about the skills we’ll be using to help us do this. As part of the lesson, we have are able to see a guided question and see the model of what an answer should look like before working alongside our peers to answer a different question.
In addition, we have been focusing on our fluency and the importance how being fluent helps us to understand the text and therefore answer the questions. We have been working on our pausing, pace and accuracy which is something we’ll continue with in th coming weeks.
Rounders Skills
Today, Crew Hamill explored the skills required to play a game of rounders. We watched a video on what rounders actually is and chotted down the main rules of the game. We then looked at our focus for the lesson – throwing and catching. We watched demonstrations of an overarm throw and an underarm throw and discussed the need for each of these during a game of rounders. We identified that an overarm throw would be required when throwing over a long distance and an underarm throw would be better if the person we were throwing to was closer to us. Following this, we went into the hall and began our warm up activities in which we practiced bouncing a ball and catching it and throwing a ball above our heads and catching it. We were challenged to make this even trickier by clapping whilst the ball was in the air, before we caught it. After this, we got into pairs and had a practise of our overarm and underarm throwing. Once we were more confident in this, we got into mini crews of 4 and practise passing the ball around the square whilst one of us ran around the posts, like a batter would. We then made this even tricker by placing a hoop in the middle of the square. One person stood in the hoop and threw out a number of tennis balls for the rest of our crew (fielders) to collect whilst we tried to run around all 4 posts to get a rounder. We can’t wait to develop our skills further and put them into practise with a full rounders game later in the term!
Understanding Money
Crew Hamill have just begun their maths unit on money. Today, we focused on pounds and pence, identifying what each of the notes and coins that we use look like and discussing their value. We then worked in mini crews to create different amounts using imitation money which we loved! We couldn’t believe how real it looked! We also looked at groups of money and had to use our counting skills to work out the total amounts.
Book Talk and Demo Comp – The Invisible Clothes
This week, Crew Hamill have really enjoyed our reading book. To begin with, we were a little confused as to what ‘The Invisible Clothes’ might be and we made predictions that it might be clothes that turned you invisible once you were wearing them – a little bit like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. Once we had analysed some of the vocabulary and read a brief introduction to the story, we realised that it was actually about a tailor who was tricking someone into buying ‘invisible’ clothes. He was actually stealing the Emperor’s money and pretending to make clothes for him! We have loved reading this story and finding out if the Emperor would be silly enough to go along with the tailor and do his usual procession around town in his ‘invisible clothes’. We found it very funny that he went along with it! During demonstration comprehension, we deepened our inference skills by focusing on 3 inference questions. This allowed us to further develop the skill of finding evidence in the text to support our own thinking.
