Another busy week in Narwhals! It's great to see how many of the children have increased their attendance this half term and I'm also very proud of how much fun they're having with their swimming lessons. This week even the instructors commented on how great their listening skills were and how they are so supportive of each other.
In English the children have had a lot of fun this week because they've been given the chance to create their own character to insert into the Wizard of Oz. To help our children get to know their characters we first looked at what made the characters in the Wizard of Oz and noticed they had similarities to each other. From here we began thinking about our characters strengths, personality, weaknesses, what they want from Oz? etc. Then we had a day of role-playing where we interviewed each other as our characters. We've really tapped into our imagination for this one and we're seeing the likes of, bubble people, cursed dolls, floating heads and many more!
In Maths we have been looking at shapes! Specifically the differences between regular and irregular polygons, followed by a day of looking at the relationship between 2-D and 3-D shapes, following that lesson we decided to investigate this a bit further to conquer some misconceptions, so we printed out a lot of nets and set about creating our 3-D shapes and sorting them into different categories.
In Science this week we looked at 'Hardness' and how we can test this with the scratch test. Since hardness was an easy concept to understand we spent most of this lesson looking at how as scientists we actually go about creating a scientific inquiry and investigation looking particularly at the Hypothesis, Results and Conclusion.
In Geography we explored the reasons as to why California was running out of water, and we learnt about how due to droughts a lot of farms are using groundwater to keep their farms and crops alive! The problem with this obviously is that all the water is being used up! We looked at satellite photography that showed how from 2002 the amount of groundwater has dwindled meaning now the situation is dire!
In History we enjoyed looking at the rulers of Anglo-Saxon and were interested to learn how each area of Britain had different kings called cynings. Each of these kings was in charge of their own land and army. We then looked at how the country was split, creating places that we still have today such as Kent, Essex and Sussex. To finish with we looked at the King of Mercia called Offa who was so mighty he gave himself the title 'first king of the English'.