Today we began our lesson by thinking about the school day. In pairs we ordered the events that happen in a typical school day such as reading, writing and maths. The children then added in important things like bagels and story time that Mrs Robson had forgotten about!
Afterwards we thought more carefully about the purpose of crew and what happens during our crew sessions as this will be the first section of our report.
In PE, we started our new unit fitness. Our aim was to understand how balance helps us in everyday life. To warm up, we played snakes and tunnels. When I shouted “snakes” we wiggled the ropes low to the ground. The children had to jump over the ropes. When I shouted “tunnels” we lifted the ropes up high. Children had to duck underneath the ropes. We then moved onto skills development and looked at balance in everyday life. In groups of 3, we had to complete an activity for 2 minutes and then swap over. The activities were skipping, lifting a hoop above our heads and then back to the floor, and stand on 1 foot whilst balancing a beanbag on our heads. We then looked at better balancing, and completed a range of activities. The first activity was standing in a line and standing on one foot. We passed the beanbag down the line and then hopped to join the end. We then had to reach the other side by lifting the hoop over their teammates head and placing it infront of them. They then had to jump back into the hoop. As part of the plenary, we discussed how we use balance in everyday life.
In maths, we have moved on to our new topic shape. We started off by looking at angles and turns. We practiced quarter turns, half turns, three quarter turns and full turns. We then practiced going clockwise and anti-clockwise. We then worked in pairs to practice turns.
In our reading lessons this week, we have continued to work on our inference skill but our text was a poem. We really enjoyed reading this poem, focusing on our fluency and pausing at punctuation. We read to our partners, played control the game, read independently and read to an adult. We also worked in pairs to answer our reasons to read.
In our writing lesson, we focussed on identifying the features that are needed for a no chronological report. We found lots of features such as: title, subheadings, facts, third person and pictures with captions. We can’t wait to start writing our non chronological report about the Mayans.
During this case study we are learning about the Egyptians. We have learnt about who they were and recalled key dates. When we were being historians, in our research we soon discovered that the River Nile was extremely important to the Egyptians as they used it for so many different things: helping to grow crops, fresh water, fishing and transporting goods. Because of the River Nile, the Egyptians were successful farmers and were able to grow a variety of foods which they ate to keep themselves healthy. We then compared childhood today to that of Ancient Egypt and experienced what they did for fun; below are some pictures of board games we created inspired my the Egyptians. We further learnt that the Egyptians believed that if they led a healthy lifestyle in this life, this would then mean they would also live a healthy and a good life in the afterlife. Hence, why the Egyptians placed such an importance on having a healthy lifestyle. Despite the Ancient Egyptians living over 5000 years ago, they were also the first to really look into medicine and began to investigate how bodies worked and how best to look after them. They created medicines, gave massages, performed surgery and used honey for its healing properties and even made toothpaste. We also learnt about the process of mummification and how they took great care in preparing bodies for the afterlife.
This afternoon, we have done some whiteboard word on some gaps in our arithmetic which are few and far between. We’ve been revisiting ones where we have made a minor error in the calculation rather than not knowing how to do it. We will continue revising different questions types until we’ve completed our assessments in week 3.
Over the last two weeks, Crew Hamill has focused on poetry for their reading lessons. We have looked at two poems that are linked to our expedition learning – Chocolate Cake by Michael Rosen and the Augustus Gloop song from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. We have done a lot of discussion on what a poem is and identified the different features. We have then had a heavy focus on inference, really testing our skills of pulling information out of a text and using clues within it to answer questions about thoughts and feelings. We have then worked in pairs to answer inference questions about the characters. We cannot wait to apply these skills to our demonstration comprehension questions and written comprehension next week.
In our final statistics lesson, Crew Hamill worked on reading data from tables and inputting missing data. We looked at a range of different questions in mini crews in which we had to use tables of data to identify values. These questions involved addition and subtraction too so we were able to recap our written methods.
To complete our statistics unit in maths, Crew Hamill began by learning how to interpret bar charts. We looked at what a bar chart was and worked as a crew to discuss what different bar charts were illustrating. We then worked in mini crews to answer questions on what the bar charts were showing us. After this, we used the information we gathered when completing pictograms and this time illustrated the data in our own bar charts.
