Christmas! All three classes have started their Christmas preparations, adorning their classrooms with paper chains and other decorations. It’s all looking very festive and we’re all excited about the craft activities and other events that will be happening next week.

News This week the school has been participating in the international ‘Hour of Code’ project.  The children have enjoyed learning how to code simple programs on the computers so that characters move and interact in particular ways. Here are some of Maple Class using the ‘Tynker’ program. They had to use repeat commands to move monsters and make them jump over obstacles to collect sweets!

Literacy All three classes have been using our knowledge about information texts and rainforest animals to create posters or leaflets.  We thought carefully about titles, subtitles, captions and interesting paragraphs using facts written in the present tense as well as labelled diagrams. The leaflets came out really well and we’re all very proud of our work! We also wrote about some original ideas for re-using old newspaper for our talk homework this week. The ideas ranged from using it as pet-bedding or starting a fire to creative activities such as papier maché model making or drawing cartoon features on the photographs! Useful Websites: Homework: The Christmas 201 word story challenge. Can you write a great story about an elf in 201 words or less?

Mathematics In Mrs Prowle’s group, we investigated the probability of rolling a 6 on a six-sided die.  Most of us thought that we were less likely to roll a 6 as it always seems really difficult when we need to do it in a board game! We worked in pairs to roll the die thirty times and recorded our results first in a frequency table and then as a bar graph.  Looking at everyone’s results we found that there was an even chance of throwing all the numbers although the individual bar graphs sometimes showed that one number was more common than another. In Mrs Roche’s group we have been practising drawing accurate bar graphs and then interpreting them. We carried out surveys on favourite colours and ways the children came to school, recorded them first on a tally chart and then worked out the frequency before we plotted our graphs. In Mrs Williams and Mrs Gilder’s group have been practising measuring.  We have measured items such as our shoes, and have started looking at capacity.  Homework: Mrs Prowle’s group – the next page from your Schofield & Simms book Mrs Roche’s group – the next page (test 7) from your Schofield & Simms book Mrs Williams and Mrs Gilder’s group – measure the length, width or height of different items around the house.

Science / Topic We had great fun, learning about the complicated food chains in the rainforest and found out that they all join together to make huge food webs. To help us understand, we made a giant web in the classroom linking all of the plants and animals together with wool.  It was amazing to see how many links there were. We also discussed how the energy flows from the sun at the beginning of each chain through all of the plants and animals until it is recycled at the end of the food chain by bacteria, fungi and insects.