NEWS! Maple Class enjoyed their pebble treat on Thursday afternoon, having filled their jar. Everyone snuggled up in their onesies and pyjamas with teddies, cushions and blankets to watch the Scooby Doo movie.  The children enjoyed popcorn and squash as an extra treat. Amazonian cooking! LKS2 had a really exciting day of South American cooking on Friday. The children were split into groups and had a go at preparing a traditional Brazilian salad, Carioca (Cheese on toast with banana!), Pesque de Quinoa (a quinoa porridge with mozzarella) and Alfajores (vanilla sandwich biscuits with a caramel filling). Everyone learned how to use knives safely and thoroughly enjoyed tasting the fruits of their labours! I think we were all surprised by how nice the Carioca was!  After lunch we had a visiting speaker whose family come from South America. She told us lots more about the rainforest and showed us some beautiful pictures of her time there. Look out for some photos from our fantastic, busy day!

Literacy Lime and Maple Class have been writing some diary entries imagining we are on an expedition to the rainforest, using a lovely book called ‘Journey into the Rainforest’ as our inspiration. We talked about imagery and reminded ourselves of the work we did before half term on using our senses to describe before creating these pieces of writing: “I stood at the top of the stairs, listening to the beautiful bird-song. Cheeky monkeys called out for their friends and dangerous mosquitoes annoyingly buzzed around me.”                                            Jamie & Keenan “…everyone was looking at a young Jaguar weaving itself through the chocolate coloured trunks of the trees.”                                       Hannah “As the plane landed, everyone waited at the windows. The pilot slid open the door, then whoosh! A blast of hot air entered the cramped cabin.”                                                                                                         Lucy “As the door opened and I stepped down onto the dusty ground, all my feelings of nervousness and exhaustion left me as I gazed on the beautiful green forest before my eyes,”                                          Iona “I stood still as a statue and thought, ‘do I really want to go on that overcrowded old speedboat?’ Then the captain interrupted my thoughts by saying, ‘this is your transport to the jetty’.”                                 Dom Homework: Y3 – practise identifying, grouping and using nouns Y4 – practise using personal pronouns accurately

Mathematics In Mrs Prowle’s group, we have been creating and interpreting the information on bar graphs. Having counted the numbers of different vowels in passages of text from the Rainforest book we have been using in Literacy, we created graphs using the data and wrote questions about them. Can you think of any questions we could ask about our data? In Mrs Williams and Mrs Gilder’s group we have continued our work on multiplication and have been using the grid method to solve 2 digit x 1 digit multiplication problems. We partitioned the 2 digit number into its tens and ones and then multiplied each part. We then recombined the two answers to find the product. Some of the children used the same method to multiply 3 digit numbers by a 1 digit number. The children then applied their skills to solving multiplication word problems. Useful Website: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/maths/ma12pape/game/ma12pape-game-written-multiplication/multiplication.swf Homework: Mrs Prowle’s group – the next page in your Schofield & Simms book Mrs Gilder and Mrs Williams group - practise the grid method for multiplication.

Science This week we continued our learning about boiling and evaporation. We studied the difference between steam and water vapour before investigating condensation. We were surprised to learn that there is water vapour all around us in the atmosphere and that this causes the condensation we see on the outside of cold drinks cans or on bowls of ice cream. Can you explain why condensation forms on some surfaces?

Topic Maple Class have been learning more about the different layers of the rainforest. Did you know that the majority of the creatures that live in these areas can be found in the canopy and never come down to the forest floor?

Lime’s Nurture Group Our focus this week was on friendship. In circle time we asked a friend to come and sit next to us and gave an example of how that friend had made us feel happy. We also talked about how we can be friendly to others who we may not be close friends with. We worked as a team to create our own spider’s web. Look at the photograph of the finished web. Can you see all of the connections between us?

Assemblies Lime have been preparing for the KS2 assembly we will be leading next week.  We have a variety of presentations to share with the juniors, including the rainforest, gymnastics, gaming and Lego friends. The audience will be greeted by some singing and will leave the assembly by some piano playing! We are really looking forward to sharing our presentations.