October 2022
Welcome to our October blog. We hope you enjoy reading about some of the learning we have been doing during the last month.
Maths and Numeracy
Roman Numeral fever took over the classroom for a few days! The children really enjoyed learning through games and other practical activities. It was great seeing them come together to work out a different way of counting. As well as using a different number system, the children have been working with different measures such as ml and l for volume and mm, cm and m for length to solve problems and work through practical activities.
Mental maths is an important part of our daily routine. This includes, number of the day,the daily dozen and the teaching of specific strategies such as near doubles and near halves.
Literacy and Language
Writing biographies was our main focus this month. Writing these involved many different skills such as note taking, summarising, picking out the main points and ordering writing in a particular way. The class chose a great variety of people to research and write about. For example we had Queen Elizabeth II to Michael Jackson to Barack Obama!
Our reading also concentrated on biographies, in paricular, black slaves who campaigned for freedom. This was our focus as October is Black History Month. We also read about the Black artist Alma Thomas and became budding artists by creating some fantastic art work based on her style of work.
STEM- Aeronautics Challenge
Safety Poster
We have been very busy completing some of the challenges for the Aeronautics Challenge. We have completed 2 of the challenges and still have another two to go! We discussed, designed and made safety posters for quadcopter flying. We also investigated different jobs in the aeronautic sector such as security, customer services, engineers and pilots.
Designing assault course for quadcopter
The children worked in groups to design an assault for the quadcopter to fly over, under and through. We have still to test the result! We will update you next month- hopefully no crashes!
Pilot visit
We all enjoyed a really interesting visit from a parent, Mr Rourke, who is a commercial pilot. We were all amazed to see beautiful photos straight from the cockpit such as The Himalayas and the Northern Lights. The children asked some great questions such as ' Have you ever flown a celebrity?' and 'Do you get special food?'Very important things to the children!
Mandarin
We said a sad goodbye to Mrs Cao last week. She has been teaching us Mandarin for the last six weeks through games, songs and written work. As we are lucky to have some Mandarin speaking children in our class, we will to build on what we have learnt so far, with some help from them!