Welcome to Westminster Bridge Class.
Class teacher: Mrs Ramakrishnan
Teaching assistant: Miss Dale
Writing
We will be finishing up our innovated warning tales this week before moving onto non chronological reports next week. In the meantime we will be focusing on SPaG (Spelling Punctuation and Grammar) concepts.
These will include: working on suffixes, apostrophes for contractions and possession and subordinating conjunctions.
Reading
Our new class read will be The Hodgeheg by Dick-King-Smith. We will be doing lots of reading comprehension style activities based on the text in preparation for the SATs in May.
Maths
At the beginning of the week we will be doing a quick multiplication assessment before moving onto our new maths unit: shape and space.
This week we will be recapping naming 2D and 3D shapes before focusing on the properties of 2D shapes. The children will need to be able to identify and count sides and vertices on 2D shapes in order to reason and problem solve.
The children will be learning/ recapping a lot of vocabulary associated with shape, sorting and pattern. It would be helpful if you could encourage and consolidate this at home.
History
We are hoping to move onto learning about a new historical figure: Pablo Picasso.
Science
We will be continuing our work on plants.
PE
We are excited to have some students from Archbishop Tennisons learning to lead PE/ games and activities as part of their Sport’s Leader’s Initiative. They will be working with us for the next 6 weeks.
Important information
We will be holding another maths workshop on Thursday 31st January. THIS IS A REPEAT OF THE CALCULATING WORKSHOP WE HELD IN DECEMBER LAST YEAR. It would be great to see you all there!
Writing
We will be continuing to look at The Magic Brush. This week we are focusing on innovating our own warning stories using a warning tale toolkit. We have worked hard on understanding the concept of a good warning tale.
SPaG
Our focus this week is on conjunction use, particularly subordinating conjunctions e.g because, when, if, until and while. They can be used at the beginning of a sentence or to join two clauses of unequal importance. For example:
I waited inside until it had stopped raining. (the phrase it had stopped raining does not make sense on its own).
Reading
Our new class read will be The Hodgeheg by Dick-King-Smith. We will be doing lots of reading comprehension style activities based on the text in preparation for the SATs in May.
Maths
We have moved onto division and have been consolidating our understanding of equal groups. This week we will be dividing by 2s, 5s and 10s with an emphasis on using pictorial representations to help us solve problems (ie drawing sharing plates etc).
For example: 50 divided by 5=___. We would draw five plates or circles to represent the groups and share or group 50 counters in each of the groups. The answer will be the amount in one of the groups.
We are encouraging the children to recognise fact families. For example: 2×5=10 and 5×2=10 therefore 10 divided by 2=5 and 10 divided by 5=2. The children should have a strong understanding that multiplication is commutative (can be done in any order) but division is not (and has to begin with the total or largest number).
History
We will be finishing our work on Florence Nightingale’s life this week.
Science
We will be moving on to looking at plants. We will be finding out and describing what plants need in order to grow. The children will be hypothesising and planning their own investigations.