Drawing pictograms

Crew Hamill had so much fun in maths today when we worked as a crew to gather data about all of our favourite things. We then used this data to create pictograms that illustrated our findings. We talked about the key and which pictures and values would be best to represent our data. After we’d done a couple together, we then worked on gathering our own data and producing our own pictograms.

Book Talk – Poetry

This week, Crew Hamill have started something new in reading – poetry! We have looked at the famous poem by Michael Rosen: I love chocolate cake. We have started with an extract of this poem that details his love of chocolate cake as a result of having chocolate cake for tea as a little boy. He talks about a time he had chocolate cake for tea and then crept downstairs for leftovers without wanting to be caught by his mum and dad. We can’t wait to read the next extract to see if he gets away with it or not! We began by text marking the poem, highlighting key vocabulary, interesting parts and things we loved or thought were important. After this, we used our inference and retrieval skills to answer a number of questions about what had happened in the extract. We have also had several opportunities to read aloud, focusing on pausing and pace. Today, we also watched Michael Rosen himself re-telling his poem and made notices about his expression, both in his voice and in his face. We then used this to perform part of the poems ourself!

Crew Marsh has talent!

In today’s experience lesson we practised our different talents ready for our Crew Marsh talent show. We discussed how a good audience should sit with good sitting, listening ears and magnet eyes on the stage. We started our talent show with Noah introducing the show, then we had a group of animals telling us funny jokes. We then watched a dance. After that, we had hula hoopers and bean bag skills. Finally, Noah closed the talent show thanking everyone for coming. I was very impressed with all the talent we saw!

Find the shape – non-chronological reports

In today’s writing lesson, Crew Hamill began with a silent conversation in which we walked around the classroom looking at chunks of our model text, making a note of things we noticed, any features we could find and any fronted adverbials we could spot. We were able to identify some key features of a non-chronological report, such as paragraphs, subheadings and fronted adverbials. Following this, we looked at some example double-page spread reports and worked in mini crews to annotate them with praises and notices. We then came together as a crew and shared these. We were able to use these to generate a checklist of non-negotiables that we are going to use when writing our own non-chronological reports. This list included things like neat, cursive handwriting and accurate, detailed drawings.

Observing Changing States

Today, Crew Hamill conducted another exciting experiment to help us to understand that some things can change state. We began by recapping a previous science experiment from Spring term in which we investigated how temperature effects the rate at which ice melts. We discussed this as we were able to identify that ice (which is a solid) melts into water (which is a liquid) if it is heated. If this is then frozen again, it will return to a solid. We then put this to the test in two ways. To begin, we had a look at wax. We discussed that this was a solid and then placed it into a wax burner which provided heat. We then left this, observing it at intervals throughout the lesson to see what happened. The block of wax disappeared before our eyes and turned into a liquid! We then switched the burner off and watched as it slowly cooled and returned to a solid. Whilst this was happening, we worked in mini crews to investigate chocolate. We placed solid chocolate into a bowl and heated it over a pan of boiling water. We watched as the chocolate melted and then placed this melted chocolate into moulds. We left this melted chocolate to cool in the moulds and are excited to see our results tomorrow when we pop the chocolates out!