Dear parents and carers,

After all of the excitement of STEM Week, we have returned to relative normality at school this week.

In maths, the children have been learning to measure both length and height. They have learnt about mm, cm and m and are now able to choose an appropriate unit of measurement for different sized objects. We practised measuring small items in the classroom using cm and larger objects in the playground in meters. If you have a tape measure at home, see if they can measure some household objects to the closest cm.

In English, we began to both plan and write our non-chronological reports about the life and times of Mary Anning. The children planned their own subheadings and then conducted research for their first paragraph before writing their first paragraph with a focus on sentence starters and conjunction use. We will continue to work on these next week and are looking forward to seeing how far their writing has come.

In Art, the long awaited return of our clay dinosaur eyes finally arrived. The children chose harmonious or complementary colours from the colour wheel, before spending time building up three layers of paint on their eyes. They made sure to use a dry-brush technique to allow the paint to dry a little in between coats. We finished them off with some metallic paint which has given them a beautiful, shiny finish.

In Science, we looked briefly at habitats before thinking about how different dinosaurs developed adaptations to help them better succeed in different environments. We also thought about the features of carnivores, herbivores and omnivores and how the features they had enabled them to be successful. There was some very interesting conversation and the children really enjoyed delving deeper into the reasons why dinosaurs don’t all look the same.