3,4A Class News
This term, our new class novel in Y3/4 is ‘The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane’. In Reading, we have used an extract from the book this week to practise different skills, such as understanding new vocabulary and retrieving information from the text. We have also been practising our reading fluency with a short poem about York – linking to our Geography and Writing units. We always discuss any new words the children are curious about – this week I felt very old trying to explain what the poet meant by York being ‘top of the pops’!
Help at home by continuing to listen to your child read and asking them questions as they go to help develop their understanding.
Science: reversible changes
In Science, year 5/6 have been learning about reversible changes.
We discussed how we could separate salt from water after making a salt water solution.
The children agreed that through evaporation we should be able to extract the salt. We decided to observe our experiment over a series of days. The picture shows what happened to the salt water solution over three days.
Help at home: discuss other reversible/ irreversible changes. Plan some of your own experiments to check whether a change is reversible or irreversible.
Fractions
Year 2 are currently learning all about fractions. We have learnt about half, quarter and thirds.
Each lesson we begin by recapping what each fraction represents.
Half means 2 equal parts.
Quarter means 4 equal parts.
Third means 3 equal parts.
We know equal is a very important word when discussing fractions. (Equal means the same amount). A shape for example, can be divided into several parts, but the parts may not be equal. See an example below.
We know that one half equals the same as two quarters.
We don’t just divide shapes into equal parts though. This can also be done with even numbers.
Help at home: by finding objects around the house (such as fruit, sweets or toys) and encourage your child to divide them into groups of 2, 3 or 4 and discuss.
Living and Learning – Health & Prevention
In these first two weeks of the term, we have been looking at health and prevention across the phase.
Last week we learnt about different types of germs and discussed the importance of washing our hands with both soap and water. This week we have learnt about dental hygiene and looked at hygiene facts as well as healthy and unhealthy habits.
Help at home by asking us what we can do to look after our personal hygiene.
Scholes in Bloom flower bed competition winner
Larraine came in to our assembly in school on Monday this week. She announced the winner of the competition. It was chosen because of the eye-catching design featuring lovely bright coloured stripes and a love heart. The winning design will be made using flowers in the bed outside the school on Morwick Grove.
Well done to the runners up too.
Living and learning: I recognise the importance of sleep
In the 5,6 phase we have been discussing how important sleep is and how this can impact your every day life we all know how good it is!
It plays a vital role in use being happy and healthy. It can boost our immune systems and it allows us to fight off diseases and our bodies can repair themselves. It can give you more energy and allows you to focus on your learning at school. If you don’t get enough sleep, it can really impact your mood – leaving you grumpy and irritable.
The recommended amount of sleep for children is between 9 and 13 hours a night. Did you get enough sleep last night?
Welcome back!
Children returned to Nursery brilliantly this week and settled in happily. We heard all about your Easter holiday trips and visits from the Easter Bunny.
The weather was very mixed this week; we had wind, rain, hail stones and sunshine! Please make sure your child has a waterproof coat everyday as we go outside in all weather.
As well as enjoying an obstacle course, children helped to sow some vegetable seeds.
In maths, we looked at the number five. We know that we have 5 fingers on each hand and we clapped and jumped five times. We looked at objects that are all linked to the number five.
Help at home: Enjoy singing number songs linked to the number 5 together with your child such as 5 Little Ducks, 5 Little men in a flying saucer, 5 Currant Buns or 5 Little Monkeys .
In our story times, we read a very popular story by Eric Carle, called ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and started to learn about the life cycle of a butterfly.
We also had a special delivery in Nursery; children were very excited to find out what was inside the little cardboard box. Inside, we found 5 tiny, spiky caterpillars! We’ve been checking on them everyday, and just like ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, they’re very hungry and are getting bigger and bigger each day.
Children showed an interest in looking for creepy crawlies outside. We found lots of creatures hiding under logs including wood lice, slugs and some very long worms.
Next week’s learning
We’ll continue with the children’s interest in bugs and worms. We’ll read Superworm and learn all about wriggly worms! If you don’t have the story book at home, follow the link to watch the animated version on BBC iPlayer.
Sound of the week: J for jellyfish
Nursery rhyme of the week: 12345, Once I caught a fish alive
The Bad-Tempered Ladybird
We’re excited to be back together for a happy and healthy Summer term!
This half term is called Life on Earth. We’ll be exploring minibeasts, wild animals, farm animals and the human body.
The Bad-Tempered Ladybird
This week, we’ve been reading The Bad-Tempered Ladybird by Eric Carle.
There was lots to explore in this story; feelings and appropriate behaviours, clocks/time and the comparative sizes of animals.
Frustrated is our ‘word of the week’.
In our writing, we’ve written things that make us feel happy and things that might make us feel sad or angry, like that bad-tempered ladybird!
Art; clay modelling
We’ve been using clay to make minibeasts. We looked at pictures and photos of minibeasts, before making our models. We had spiky caterpillars, wiggly worms and crawly spiders to name just a few! Clay is great for our fine motor skills. We have to work hard to mould, pull, press and shape. We’ll be continuing with our clay creations into next week.
Maths
In Maths, we’ve been counting beyond ten- to twenty. We’ve been suggesting ways to make counting easier, when we are faced with a lot of objects to count.
We’ve also been counting things that cannot be moved, or things that cannot be seen (such as sounds/actions)
In provision, we explored doubles through doubling ladybirds and recorded our findings.
Help at home- Challenge your child to count more than ten objects. Can they count the pegs on the washing line? Can they count toys in their toy box? Can they count books on a book shelf? Don’t forget to send in photos of counting at home!
Caterpillars
We’ve got some new additions to the classroom, as this week some very tiny caterpillar friends arrived! We’ve been observing them and have been writing about the caterpillar life cycle. Some of us also wrote down how we will keep them safe. We can’t wait to see them change and grow over the next few weeks.
Phonics
Summer 1 week 1 has been an introduction to reading phase 4 words. We’ve also learnt our first phase 4 tricky words; said, so, have, like
Help at home- Please continue to work through the weekly learn at home phonics sheets, throughout the Summer term. We’ll continue to send these home each Friday.
Poetry Picnic
Each week we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called Pitter Patter
We talk about how a poem sometimes has rhyming words and sometimes doesn’t. Can your child tell you the rhyming words in this week’s poem? We also talk about how a poem can have a fast rhythm or a slow rhythm.
click below to watch us recite this week’s poem!
More pictures of our learning this week…
Reminders and Dates
SWIMMING DATES- Summer 1
Rainbow Class- 1 May, 15 May
Sunshine Class- 24 Apr, 8 May, 22 May
Y4 Skipping Festival
On Wednesday this week, many of the Y4s participated in a skipping festival held at Leeds Trinity University. They competed against five other schools in different techniques – including individual efforts such as the double bounce and the pretzel – and team efforts such as ‘run in, jump out’. Throughout the afternoon, there were also whole group sessions to try out different skipping exercises to music.
The children represented the school so well, showing a fantastic attitude to their teammates and trying their best, even when the competition was tough! Well done to everyone, you made us proud. 
3,4A Class News
It’s been great to see everyone back at school this week! In Writing, we have started to look at promotion texts and their features, including present tense, questions, commands and alliteration. We will be writing our own promotion about York. This links in with our new Geography topic – Explorers! We have started off by learning about global climate zones and then focusing in on the countries in Europe. Later on in the topic, we will be comparing the two cities of York and Venice.
On the same theme, we have used a non-fiction text about York to practise different reading skills including retrieval, summarising and understanding the meaning of words in context..
In Science, we have been completing our unit on light. We carried out an experiment to see what happened to the size of the shadow when we moved a light source further away from an opaque object.
Help at home by asking us what we discovered! Feel free to quiz us on the terms opaque, translucent and transparent too.
