NEWS   On Tuesday the whole school gathered at 10.40 for a special Remembrance assembly lead by Maple Class culminating in a two minutes’ silence at 11am. All of the children listened beautifully to the presentation about World War I and the reasons for wearing poppies and then showed great respect for the silence. Well done everyone!    Well done to Poplar Class for a very interesting and important assembly about staying safe online. There were lots of really good messages there to help everyone think carefully about the information they publish about themselves.   Today we have been getting into the spirit of Children in Need by dressing up as heroes. Some of the children chose to be famous superheroes while others used their creativity to make up their own characters. Everyone looked fantastic and each class voted to find their best costume. Here are the LKS2 heroes: Lime winner: Hannah    Maple, with their winner, Olivia   Nurture Group This week, Lime explored changes in Nurture Group. We thought about the changes we have experienced and how these changes make us feel. We enjoyed some vegetable snacks with dips and some of us tried things we have never tried before!     LITERACY   Maple Class wrote up their talk homework about their favourite seasons. There was a real mix but I think most enjoyed Winter because of Christmas or Summer because they can get outside and play! Here are some extracts:   “Spring is lovely with its amazing weather. It starts of quite cold with frost and fog but near the end of Spring, because it’s nearly Summer, it gets really warm.”   Olivia   “I especially like Winter because it’s nice and cosy and you can snuggle up with your family in front of the red, burning flames.”     Charlotte   “My favourite part is kicking the leaves and enjoying the rustling sound hit my ears.”    Megan   “The blankets of white frost look good when they are spread across the ground.”    Sam   “As the leaves get as cold as ice they get crunchier and crunchier. I crack through them step by step.”    Ben     We have also been preparing and practising hard for our two assemblies next week and learning about the different types of noun.   Could you say which type of noun (abstract, proper, common or collective) these words are? -      Edinburgh -      flock -      coat -      excitement   Lime class: Our talk homework on seasons provided us with lots of ideas on which season is our favourite. We worked hard to extend our sentences by adding detail. We also developed our writing organisation, grouping similar ideas together.   We have started looking at a lovely book called ‘Journey into the rainforest’.  It is non-fiction and we are learning to identify the features of information texts so that we can write our own. Poplar Class: Our favourite season was definitely autumn. The children love the crunching of the leaves and the warm fires. They also enjoy the fireworks and children in need ceremonies.   Homework: Maple – homework this week is to learn the two songs for our sharing assembly. Some children have also chosen to create their own superhero to fit our Children in Need theme this year.   Lime and Poplar – Create your own superhero MATHEMATICS   Mrs Prowle’s group: This week we have been thinking in more detail about the more complex properties of polygons including their symmetry, which sides are parallel or perpendicular and the relationships between their angles. On Friday we did maths in our classes and completed some fun Pudsey maths to coincide with Children in Need.   Mrs Gilder and Mrs Williams's group have been exploring multiplication. We used the numicon to show that it doesn't matter what order your multiplication is, the answer is the same! We also explored how multiplication can be represented using arrays.  Have a go at this game to consolidate your learning: http://www.snappymaths.com/multiplication/earlymult/interactive/arrays/arraysframe.htm   Homework: Mrs Prowle’s group: The next page in your Schofield & Simms book please.   Mrs Roche’s group: Looking at the net of a prism. Worksheet and instructions in your folders. SCIENCE Maple class were challenged by the manager of a football team to work out the best way to get the team’s kit dry between matches on Saturday and Sunday without using a tumble dryer as this shrank the shorts! We thought carefully about different ways to dry things and devised an investigation to test which one would be most useful. We thought that it would be difficult to depend on hanging the kit outside as the football season happens when the weather isn’t great. We also discussed the practicalities of hanging at least 11 sets of kit over radiators! In the end we decided to try and replicate the conditions inside for hanging clothes out on a line. Using 3 pieces of the same material that were the same size with the same amount of water added to them to ensure it was a fair test, we placed each in a different part of the room. One was by the closed window, one in the middle of the room and we hung one next to a fan to replicate the wind. We found that the material being blown by the fan dried much quicker than the other two so we decided that would be the best method for the manager to dry his kit and wrote him an email to explain. RE Lime class discussed how Muhammad (pbuh) would have felt at different points in his life.  We also had a go at memorising parts of his life story and retelling it as a class.