Book talk in MI

13th November 2024Stacey McClare

Today we looked at a poem linking to WW2. We enjoyed exploring the text today, unpicking language and text marking. Before reading, we looked at the text, thinking about what we noticed. We thought about how the text was laid out, what the pictures were showing and what the text reminded us of. We had some great discussions before we even started reading! We then looked more into the structure and layout, we looked at the title and the stanzas used. We thought about whether all poems have rhyming words and found some examples ourselves. From here we explored each stanzas, unpicking vocabulary and unpicking what the words actually meant. This was a great reading session where everyone was really engaged in the text. Our exit ticket allowed us to share our thoughts on the poem, we thought about if we liked the poem and if it evoked any feelings. We related our thoughts back to our expeditionary learning discussing some of the lessons we have already completed.

Maths week continues in MI

12th November 2024Stacey McClare

Today we consolidated our learning from yesterday by adding money amounts mentally. We then moved onto adding amounts using a written method and found change! We loved visiting Crew MI’s shop, choosing different items we wanted to buy.

Odd socks day in MI

12th November 2024Stacey McClare

Today we wore odd socks to school to celebrate that everyone is unique. We continued to look at the theme of the week- respect and also linked this to kindness. We thought about how we feel when people are kind to us and why it is important to treat other people the way we want to be treated. We then made pledges… To help stop bullying and to show kindness to all people, I pledge… We worked well in mini crews to build our pledges then shared with the whole crew. From here we looked at our activity linking to odd socks day. We worked with our partner to discuss ways in which we are same and ways we are different. We loved this activity and found out more about others. We then thought about how we wanted to showcase our odd socks!

Money Money Money

12th November 2024Ruth Shields

Before starting our money unit in maths, we had the opportunity to play with the money so we’d feel more confident recognising the coins. While working with our partner, we gave them an amount of money and they had to count how much they had. This encouraged us to count in multiples of 1,2,5,10,20 and 50 supporting our understanding of place value.

Mechanisms

12th November 2024Laura Hamill

Today, Crew Hamill began looking at mechanisms. We began our lesson by testing our sticky knowledge and recapping previous learning. Following this, Miss Hamill introduced us to some new vocabulary that we would need to understand in order to access our lesson. We then had to look at pictures of different objects and decide which mechanism was being used with each one (E.g. a pulley for a flag pole). We then watched some informative videos about pulleys, lever and gears, making notes on big pieces of chotting paper in mini crews as we did so. Once we’d gathered all of our information, we inputted this onto a Padlet to keep a record of what we had learned.

Case Study reflection

12th November 2024Ruth Shields

Before starting our next case study, we reflected on what we had learned during history. We used padlet to collate our facts and thoughts while working in pairs. We were given some headings where we could put our facts. We then put all of this on an anchor chart which we used to help us answer the guiding question.

When leftovers could belong to both clauses

12th November 2024Laura Hamill

Today, we looked at what happens when you are building single-sentence clauses but you have ‘leftovers’ that could belong to either clause you are creating. We followed our script to identify verbs and subjects, then labelled the leftovers that were easier to identify (the leftover at the end belonging to the second clause). We then looked at how the leftover in the middle could belong to either clause. It could be the ending of the first clause, adding extra information, or it could be used at the beginning of the second clause with a comma being used after it. We had a go at doing this in pairs and playing around with the structure of our clauses before completing our exit ticket to illustrate what we had learned.

Activating our inference skills

12th November 2024Laura Hamill

Today, we continued to activate our inference skills by looking at a poem. We were introduced to the poem yesterday and worked hard to pull the text apart, identifying key vocabulary and labelling the text with key information and notes that we felt were helpful in our mission to understand poetry and what they poem was actually about. We then used these notes today to delve deeper into inferring the feelings of the characters. We began by working as a crew to identify the key points in the text for the first character, Chloe, and discussed how we thought she was feeling at each of these points. We used evidence from the text to support our ideas (E.g. she was happy at the beginning because she was looking out into space with open eyes). We then created a line graph to detail our findings. Following this, we worked in pairs to do the same for the second character, Max. Once we’d done this, we brought both graphs together to compare their feelings throughout the poem. We identified that Max was a much happier, more positive character, whilst Chloe was much less positive as she worried a lot and was scared by the idea of adventure.

Investigating Water Reisistance

12th November 2024Laura Hamill

We moved on from air resistance to start looking at another type of friction – water resistance. We built our background knowledge by watching a few informative videos and reading some key information to help us understand that water resistance is a type of force that uses friction to slow things down that are moving through water. Once we’d learned that the shape of an object in water can impact on the amount of water resistance, we tested our hypothesis that thinner, more streamlined shapes, would travel quicker through the water than wider shapes with a larger surface area. We worked in pairs to create two different shapes using plasticine and then conducted an experiment in which we dropped each shape, at the same time, into a jar that contained the same amount of water. We tested these shapes a few times before recording our results and concluding whether or not our hypothesis was correct. We were pleased to discover that we were correct!