Happy New Year and welcome back to an exciting new term. We have been busy acquiring new skills and completing practical activities to launch our new learning.

In Writing, we have begun to read the book Arthur and the Golden Rope, a story set in Anglo-Saxon Iceland. We have used the illustrations to help us write character descriptions of the town's people using double adjectives with commas and fronted adverbials. In Maths, we have been exploring graphs and data handling. We have used tables to help us to create pictograms, bar graphs and line graphs. We have thought about the scales we need on the y axis (2, 5, 10 and 20) and have practised answering questions about patterns in the data.

We began our Science topic, Sound, with a sound walk around the school to discover if anywhere in the school was totally silent. We found sounds even in the quietest areas. This week, we explored how sound travels as vibrations, we played sound location games and created our own string telephone. We found out that the tighter the string on the telephone the louder and clearer the sound was.

Our Humanities topic is Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. We began this topic by creating paper Anglo-Saxon boats to invade Britain. We used maps to show where they invaded from and the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain. Later, we solved the mystery of the boat burial at Sutton Hoo, East Anglia. We investigated clues to find out which Anglo-Saxon king it belonged to.

We have also begun our DT topic by creating Lego prototypes of a golf swing game and programmed them to rotate and knock a ball down a green. After researching and designing, we will build our own models.