W/C 09.01.23

This week we introduced our new focus value of the half term, 'determination'. We discussed what determination means and how we can show determination at school. The children gave some fantastic definitions and examples. In class, they have most definitely been showing this in all aspects of their school day.

English

We began by sequencing the story of The Bear and the scary night, identifying the key events. Over the next few weeks we will be building up to write a retell of the story in first person. To help us with this, we completed a skills lesson to help us understand first person, I, me, we, us, our. Following this, we retold the beginning of the story, with first person as the key skill focus. We finished the week off by retelling the middle of the story, for this we focused on using adjectives to describe

Maths

We have been continuing with our work on measure. In doing so, we looked at measuring using standard measures, in order to give an accurate measurement of an object. We used rulers to measure in centimeters (cm). We began by practically measuring the height of different sized gingerbread men. Once we were confident with this, we moved onto answering varied fluency and problem solving/reasoning questions to take our learning deeper. 

We then moved onto geometry, looking at 3D shapes. We identified the different 3D shapes sphere, cylinder, cube, cuboid, pyramid and cone.

History

We looked at the question 'How has Stoke changed?' We looked at what we can see in Stoke-on-Trent now, using our prior learning in Geography on human and physical features. We then looked at what it looked like in the past, with a specific focus on our local area and changes around our school. We learned that Stoke-on-Trent was once a thriving area for pottery, containing many factories and that where our school now stands, was once a factory called 'Imperial Works Pottery' and the housing estate was once 'Trent Works'. We looked at photos from the past and went outside to look around our school and took photos to show the changes. 

Art

We looked at the artist Eva Rothschild, continuing our work on the topic 'Let's sculpt'. We used marshmallows and cocktail sticks to create our own sculptures. We thought about the shapes we were going to use in our artwork and if we were going to make it tall or wide, as well as whether or not it would be able to stand up on its own. We found making 3D shapes was the best to make our structures strong and sturdy. We had so much fun, working as a team with our peers to create, improve and problem solve to create a variety of sculptures.

Science

In Science this half term we are going to be looking at seasons, focusing on autumn into winter. This week we looked at what the weather is like in autumn. We found out that in autumn the amount of time it is light becomes less which means it gets darker earlier. We also learned that in the autumn, the weather is usually a bit chilly. The temperature around the UK drops, especially in the evening and at night and that there is usually more rain than during the summer and it can be foggy too.