Spring fun!

This Spring term certainly flew by! In our English lessons, we have been using the 'Shadow of the Minotaur' book by Alan Gibbons as a stimulus for our writing. We have successfully produced a setting description of the Labyrinth, a character description on the Minotaur and a short section of the narrative using dialogue. Across all of these outcome writes, we have been learning about a range of devices and techniques to make our writing appeal to our reader, such as compound adjectives, dialogue to advance the action, words ending in -ing and -ed to open sentences and a range of sentence structures. See some of our best writing below! During the summer term, we will be using a video called 'Pandora' to write a non-chronological report on, as well as engaging in some writing activities that persuade our readers! We have been focusing on presentation, handwriting and spelling too! Our early morning activities help us consolidate what we have been learning in class during our Destination Reader and English sessions. 

In Maths this half term, we have been revisiting areas of learning which we need more support in, such as fractions, decimals, percentages, shape and statistics. In order to get ready for our upcoming SATS, we have continued our daily Arithmetic sessions covering typical questions and domains that arise in the Arithmetic paper. We are all very proud of our progress we have made! To incorporate more practical activities into our Maths lessons, we have carried out some whole class investigations. So we could understand how to use a protractor to produce a pie chart, we gathered data on each child's eye colour. From that data in  the tally chart, we then drew a pie chart with accurate angles to convey the percentages.

In our History lessons, we have been looking at Ancient Greece and the different periods. We have learnt that there are 6 Ancient Greek periods, from the Minoan  civilisation 3000BC to the end of the Hellenistic periods in 30 BC. Throughout the unit we will be exploring the city state of Athens and explore the lasting legacy of Ancient Greece.

We were also lucky enough to have a WW2 workshop in Spring 2 from a drama company to consolidate and revisit our WW2 knowledge. During the workshop, we participated in a range of drama activities such as freeze frames and conscience alleys to really feel how the soldiers must've been feeling.

As part of Science week, we were lucky to have a scientist deliver an engaging workshop on electrical circuits. This recapped on our Science knowledge we have developed in Autumn, but also throughout our KS2 journey. We had a hands-on experience with components of a circuit and were sat various challenges we had to complete. Lots of teamwork, perseverance and determination were demonstrated from the children!

In Science this half term, our unit has been looking at evolution and inheritance. We carried out a practical experiment to find out which type of bird beak is the best to pick up different food types. To mimic different types of bird beaks, we used various kitchen utensils such as chopsticks, pipettes, tweezers and tongs. We used different types of foods too such as seeds, macaroni and rice. 

Book Week was a huge success! Our theme for book week this year was environmental issues and sustainability. Using 'The Promise' by Nicola Davies, we produced a book of setting descriptions to compare the dull,  lifeless landscape portrayed at the start of the book to the end where the landscape is lush, green and beautiful!