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Weekly update: 11.10.24

I hope you've had a good week. Apologies for not producing a blog last week but we were all rather tired from our Thames Young Mariners adventure! The children made us so proud with their resilient attitudes and just seizing the moment to enjoy the experience. Well done to them all!

BBC 500 Words Writing Competition
Writing for a real life purpose is a key element to producing a fantastic piece of writing. We are therefore encouraging the children to enter this prestigious BBC writing competition and have put slides onto Google Classroom with further information. I know some children have already started to plan their stories and it's amazing to hear such enthusiasm! This is an optional activity but we are really keen to build up writing stamina and to simply encourage a love of writing. If your child does choose to enter, please do send in a copy of their story as we would love to celebrate them.  

Here's what we have been up to this week:

English
The children have spent lots of time planning a big story based on Journey. These are almost finished and next week they will 'publish' them by sharing them with the Year 4 children. We will then move on to a short unit based on the facts and newsreel about The Windrush.

Maths
We are almost at the end of our addition and subtraction unit and will shortly be starting to look at multiplication and division. Times tables fluency is key to this (and to lots of primary maths) and so it is essential that the children brush up their skills. TT Rock Stars is available to use at home and there are many other online resources, as well as good old-fashioned recital and learning them off by heart! 

Art
This week we considered push and pull factors of migrations. The push factors are the circumstances that make people leave their home/country (or push them away) or factors that draw them to another place (pull factors).

Science
The children carried out another comparative investigation, this time to see which material was the best thermal insulator. This involved wrapping ice cubes in various materials and observing which cube melted the slowest and thinking about why.

Art
We have been looking at African art and repeating patterns. Last week we looked at an artist from the Ndebele tribe, Esther Mahlangu, who created art inspired by the decorations on the local houses. This week, we discovered the origins of batik and learnt about someone who creates batik for a living.

Dates:
3-4th October Thames Young Mariner residential
8th October Royal Institution science show at Tiffin Girls' (in school time)
4th November inset day
18th November  Kingston Mosque trip
10th February Science Museum trip
1st May Hampton Court trip

Assessments
Just to let you know that we will be carrying out a few assessments over the first few days this week (maths and reading only).