Willow wb 08.05.23
This week, the children in Willow class have been learning about the key processes in the water cycle as part of our new topic 'Raging Rivers'. We explored the definitions of evaporation, condensation, precipitation and accumulation and then created an interactive diagram as a way to explain our knowledge. We learnt about the crucial role the sun plays in our water cycle and how these processes are linked with rivers. Going forward, we are now going to be finding out about the three main stages of a river and which features you are likely to find in each section. Our Year 4 children also got a first hand experience of rivers on Wednesday as we took part in a bell boating session along the River Avon. A particular highlight was getting to experience the lock! Our instructor opened one of the gates for us so we could see how the water level was changing at different points which was really interesting to see. It was also a great opportunity to develop our team work skills and we had to focus on paddling in time with one another as well as coordinating our forward and back paddling in order to turn the boats.
We have been working hard to learn and recall our times tables as part of our everyday work in Maths and the children are doing a great job. We focused on our 6s this week as we have been learning all about time in class and so this has helped us convert hours to minutes when counting on by 60 minutes. Our Year 3 children have also been learning to tell the time to five minutes and to one minute. They have used the clocks to practise displaying specific times and starting to work out time differences. Meanwhile, our Year 4 children have been continuing to explore money and in particular, problem solving skills. They have been looking at how to approach a word problem and apply their knowledge to reach an accurate answer in the appropriate units.
In our writing lessons we have been learning to use subordinating conjunctions such as while and as in order to extend our sentences and add specific details. The children were given a 'busy picture' of a rainforest which they had to form sentences about, building in a variety of conjunctions. This is a skill we are going to apply in next week's writing whereby we are planning and writing our own chapter for our class text 'Journey to the River Sea'. We have also been reading another text as part of our Reading lessons. We began the first few chapters of Esio Trot and familiarised ourselves with the main characters. We looked at selecting words from the text to prove our points and the children were doing a great job with this.
Much of our learning has been outside of the classroom this week and we were lucky enough to visit Forest School for our first visit of the term.
