Willow wb 24.04.23
Willow class have had another busy week! They have begun a new unit in Computing, had a cricket workshop in PE, attended a cluster football tournament and even had their first swimming lesson of the term.
In Science lessons, we looked at how ideas about the position of the planets in our solar system have changed throughout history. We found out about the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus and how he developed his heliocentric model of the solar system. We’ve also been investigating the distances of the different planets from the sun. As the distances were so long, we talked about using a scale model and created this using a toilet roll to help us.
In Music, we learnt our new song ‘Bringing Us Together’. We’re learning this using sign language and it’s been great to see how quickly everyone is picking this up. We have also been practising our song for the Coronation which is called 'Sing for the King'.
In Topic lessons, the children have been making comparisons with the biomes we would expect to find in the USA. We learnt about how great the variety in animals, plants and climate is across some of the states and considered some reasons as to why this is. The children produced some riddle clues to describe some of the biomes and climate zones found in these areas.
In PE, we were lucky enough to participate in a cricket workshop this week. We had a coach who worked with the children to introduce cricket skills with the aim for the children to take up the sport. They all enjoyed the experience and for some children it was their first taste of cricket.
In Maths, our Year 3 children have been working on calculating fractions of amounts. They have been using lots of practical resources to support their understanding of this concept. Meanwhile, our Year 4 children have been working on expressing halves and quarters as both fractions and decimals, applying their understanding of equivalent fractions too.
Our Writing lessons have been focused on the use of dialogue and punctuation, using our text 'Journey to the Sea'. We wrote a discussion between Maia and Miss Minton who are two of the main characters after they received a letter from their old school. The children have been working on using inverted commas accurately and putting in the correct punctuation around the dialogue.
We finished off the week with our work on river art. We looked at a selection of impressionist images from Claude Monet dedicated to the River Thames where he painted two views from his balcony over and over again. This way, Monet was able to capture the changing colours under various weather conditions and at different times. Monet most enjoyed painting at sunrise, midday and sunset, when the light and the colours were most striking . We then used water colours to create a colour match for different sections of these images.
