Willow wb 23rd January

Willow class have had a very productive week and produced some fantastic work. 

In our Topic lessons, we have been learning about the silk road and the reasons why Baghdad was a centre for trade. We mapped the key locations for trade which included Europe, India, China and Egypt, and discovered that it got its name as it was first used to carry Chinese silk. Baghdad’s position at the centre of the east to west trade routes helped the city to become a major power. We also learnt about the importance of trading spices, gold, paper and silk. 

This week in Science, we looked at freezing and melting, learning how solids and liquids can change state through heating and cooling (we could see this in action as it was a very icy day!). We were then all given different facts about the melting points of different metals and had to ask each other questions to find out the information we were missing. We also had some interesting discussions about why mercury is different to other metals. In Music, we worked on keeping the pulse before doing some improvisation, clapping different patterns that fitted with our piece of music

Our focus in Maths has been all about measurements. The Year 3 children have been converting between mm, cm and m as well as comparing different measurements. They are now experts at using a ruler precisely! The Year 4 children have been converting between cm, m and km and looking at why we use km as a useful measurement. They have been great at dividing and multiplying by powers of 10 to convert between different units. 

Firebird by Saviour Pirotti is our new text which we are using in our writing lessons and this week, we have been using the images to generate precise expanded noun phrases to describe this mythical creature. The children produced some amazing list poems where they applied their vocabulary choices and some of examples will be displayed on our working wall. 

Our Computing lesson was linked to our Art work and we have created tesselating patterns. We used the different tools to select a shape which would tesselate and then fill them with different colours to look at the impact that colour choices have. We also looked at an artist who uses tesselating shapes to create their final pieces. 

Next week we will be looking more deeply at the city of Baghdad and continuing to develop our Computing skills.