English – We have been focussing on the character Zeus in our class novel – the king of the Greek gods!  The children started by creating mind maps to sort facts, opinions and key characteristic of Zeus using evidence in the story to support their ideas.  Then they ordered some of the key events of his life on a timeline and added descriptive phrases to this.  They used the information gathered to draft, edit/improve and publish a biography about Zeus.  Some of the key features they focussed on were ensuring they wrote in past tense, use of third person, ordering events in chronological order, using time connectives, paragraphs, emotive language and quotes.

Maths – Year 4 children have been looking at time this week and solving problems involving hours/minutes/seconds, years/months/weeks and using analogue to digital time (12 hour and 24 hour).  Year 5’s have been continuing to solve problems about properties of shapes – calculating lengths and angles in shapes, regular and irregular polygons and reasoning about 3D shapes.

Topic – They have been comparing schooling in Ancient Athens with schooling in modern Britain.  They researched some information and came up with lots in interesting facts and comparisons.

RE – They used the timeline of the Bible (the ‘frieze’) and found the events of creation, God and the ‘Fall’ through the images shown.  Then they listened to the story of Adam and Eve and discussed the hidden meaning/message in the story – temptation!  Then they worked in groups to take on the roles of the man, woman, snake and God with one person interviewing each character.  They thought very hard to think of interesting questions and answering in role.

Spellings – To be tested on Friday 22nd June.

Spellings 15-6-18

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing you all very soon.

Mrs Thomas

English – We have looked at the key features of a newspaper report and planned and written our own reports based on the wedding of Zeus in ‘Who let the god’s out?’  We have focussed particularly on ensuring the headline is short and snappy, effective use of paragraphs to describe what happened and included quotations, captions/photos, facts and opinions using the text to support our ideas.

Maths – Year 4’s have been finding lines of symmetry and completing a symmetrical figure.  Year 5’s have been calculating angles on a straight line and calculating angles around a point.

Topic – We have been understanding the factors that decided the power of the Ancient Greek city states.  The children were split into groups to plan an argument for one of the opinions, e.g. the long walls, navy, army, slaves.  They used information in groups to plan their argument and presented this to the rest of the class.

RE – We started our new topic ‘What do Christians learn from the creation story?’  The children discussed what ‘temptation’ means and discussed/wrote about who is being tempted and by what.

Art – Designing and making a Greek patterned tile in a mosaic style.

Spellings – to be tested on Friday 15th June –   Spellings 8-6-18

I hope you’ve all had a good week – I’ve heard that you have all been working very hard!

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Thomas