On Friday afternoon, we moved on to the next unit of computing which is about coding. We had some time to tinker with scratch before working through some activities. One of these activities was to create a loop of code which basically means that the sprite will continually do an action (on a loop). We really enjoyed being able to tinker with and explore scratch and look forward to exploring this more in future computing lessons.
Now that we’ve finished our plot points, it’s time to edit and redraft some of our writing. In our writing lesson on Friday, we were shown some examples of writing from children’s books and we were shown how to edit a piece of work. Then we had an opportunity to work through some sentences and share our thoughts with the rest of the class. Next, we’ll look at redrafting and have time to redraft our own writing so we can uplevel it.
In our second book talk session, we have been focusing heavily on the skills needed to answer fact and retrieval questions. This ended up lasting 2 lessons because we had some good discussions about the skills we need to use. We had some questions modelled and then we had an opportunity to apply these skills. In addition, we have still be drip feeding inference questions as we continue to develop our written answers to these type of questions.
On Thursday afternoon, we had some time after lunch doing some litter picking. Even better that we got some additional time in the sunshine. Crew Shields did a great job picking up rubbish as we know it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep our environment clean, tidy and safe.
During our writing lesson, we’ve been discussing the importance of proofreading our writing. Before completing our plot point, we swapped books and provided some praises and wonders to help our partners move their learning forward.
In our book talk lesson, we have been focusing on gaps from our previous assessments. As part of this, we’ve been using different formats so that we are familiar with different ways questions can be presented to us. We worked together as partners to come up with predictions but ensuring we linked this back to what we already know.
In history, we have been learning about where the cacao bean comes from and how it’s grown. We used QR codes to access some reading materials providing lots of information. We then had to use our skimming and scanning skills to help us locate the relevant information to answer questions.
We the looks at the differences between how the Maya processes cacao beans and how they’re processed now to keep up with the demand.
In our book talk session this week, we have continued to focus on inference. We have texted marked the next couple of pages in our book, highlighting any words we wasn’t sure of. We used skills such as read around the word and looking at the root word to unpick this vocabulary.
In preparation for our final plot point in writing, we were super excited to spend a lesson taste testing a number of different types of sweets. These sweets triggered different taste buds on our tongue, meaning we reacted to them in different ways. We were able to use our experience to create a bank of vocabulary to support our writing. We pulled lots of funny faces – especially with the sour and fizzy sweets.
In expedition, Crew Hamill began looking at the process involved in making a chocolate bar out of a cacao bean. We identified the main steps in the process and matched these to a description of what each step involved, placing them in chronological order. We were then given a picture of each step that we had to also match up correctly. Following this, we looked at some facts about chocolate production, such as, children are used to collect the cacao beans and on average, cocoa farmers earn just 6% of the final value of a bar of chocolate. We had to decide whether these facts were fair or unfair and make a decision on what we thought overall. We were very surprised by how many unfair comments there were and couldn’t believe children were used for many of the steps.
