Oak Class Week 4

We are now officially half way through this half term and time is whizzing by. 

Maths moved onto Roman numerals and negative numbers this week. We did a great job with both these elements of place value, but our most impressive progress has come in our mental lessons. We have all been developing our problem solving skills and applied our understanding of number, to work out the many possible answers.

We have closely studied how Michael Morpurgo structures his stories, especially Kensuke's Kingdom and have been creating our own ideas bank as we will be writing a story based on an island.  We have researched different islands habitats, terrains and wildlife just like a real author would do. Our list of potential characters who may inhabit the island or feature in the story is growing too. Using our skimming and scanning skills, we have also been 'magpie-ing' some of the author's vocabulary and descriptive phrases to use in our own stories.

In Science we have been looking at the tubs of salt water left over from our Alien Soup and were amazed to discover the salt did reappear. The children were fascinated by the salt crystals and their wonderous shapes and sparkle. It has really caught their interest in dissolving so that is our next step to investigate further.

My diligence to save egg boxes for the last few months paid off this week in Art as we used them to start a 3D model of a face. We will continue to work on these next week adding on some hair and painting them to bring out more character. The children used double sided sticky tape for the first time in this task and were amazed by it!!

In a quick round up of other lessons this week, we looked at how Vikings may have earnt their bad reputations using sources written at the time.  We are practising for our Harvest Assembly performance so be prepared to be impressed by this, and we had a great time swimming too - lots of worn out children on a Thursday afternoon! In Computing we are developing our own ideas for a computer game and have started to design the background and the sprits on 'Scratch'.

We all dressed in red for the Air Ambulance on Thursday too - don't we look smart?