We have been exercising our persuasive muscles in order to write our own ‘Boudicca’ passionate speeches!  The children have used emotive language, the rule of three, fact and opinion, alliteration and rhetorical questions to persuade the local tribes to join the battle against the invading Romans.

In anticipation of designing our very own Roman villas next week, we have been revising our knowledge of 2D shape as well as how to calculate the area.  We have used squares in our maths books to make different shapes that have the same area.  We have also looked at how to calculate what the area is of shape by multiplying the two sides. 

We have been learning the 12x tables this week and have recorded them in our blue books.  Please make sure these come in to school each day in your child’s backpack.  Here are some useful websites to help make learning fun! Remember to help your child to do the TT Rockstars challenge this week!

Daily Ten (click through to level 4 multiplication and try the mixed table activities)

TT Rockstars (help your child to log on for 10 minutes, maybe three or four times a week)

This week, we have been studying the short ‘i’ sound and all its representations. The children have a sticker in their Spelling Journals but here are the words for this week: 

experiment, analysis, binoculars, builder, build, consider, different, minute, interesting, ethical 

Remember, Tracey’s group do not have to learn the class spellings.

This week, we have been asking the question, “Can we believe everything we see online?” We studied some pictures that were clearly photoshopped (ask your child about the horse-shark and the tiger-budgie!), and then looked at some that were more realistic. We are learning to be more discerning as we become more exposed to online content. 

This week the children listened to the story of There’s a Boy Just Like Me by Fraser Cox and Alison Brown and then made their own individual jigsaw pieces on which they wrote about things that are unique or different about themselves.  We are now compiling a whole-class jigsaw picture of each class which shows that although we are different, we are part of one whole. 

We are beginning to learn the skills of netball this term.  On Monday, we enjoyed a skills carousel where we practised targeting our throwing accurately as well as throwing and catching bean bags and balls with increasing speed and accuracy. 

The children learned the concept of repeating patterns this week. We looked at Roman motifs and made a mindmap of our favourites as well as some of our own.  The children then designed a tile, repeating our chosen motifs, trying to make some symmetrical.  After copying our final design on to a tile, they were printed onto paper using printing inks. We are very proud of our creations!