Cracking comprehension
It’s Monday afternoon which means we have cracking comprehension with Mrs Bald!
First News
We all enjoyed reading the First News newspapers this afternoon. We read them before having a discussion as a class. You could do this at home, too! 
Our first week!
What’s going on in class
Having thoroughly enjoyed our mini-topic ‘The Lost Thing’, we’ve now started a Big Topic called ‘Holidays’. The topic began by exploring two suitcases and predicting where we could be visiting (real and imaginary) in the next 8 weeks. We then look at the top ten holiday destinations from the UK in Summer 2015 and researched one of these countries in greater detail.
Topic – In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be planning a holiday abroad, looking at temperature, rainfall and all sorts of other important deciding factors. We’ll delve into the world of physics to understand how planes stay in they sky and boats don’t sink as well as starting to compare the UK to a (currently mystery) destination in the Americas.
Help at home by searching flights online, looking at how long it takes and discussing the children’s idea for how the plane works.
Maths – Alongside this, we’ll learn lots about other countries by understanding graphs, tables and charts in our maths lessons. We’ll need to answer basic retrieval questions as well as compare data and use graphs that might be less familiar to us (pie charts).
Help at home by exploring different ways of presenting data and see which you think are the clearest and what makes them easy to understand (labelled axes, titles etc).
English – We’ll look at different types of sentences (simple, compound and complex) and practise writing these accurately before moving on to writing discussions to put forward different sides of an argument.
Help at home by discussing guided reading books and how sentences vary their openers, some are very short and some very descriptive and there are different joining words (but, because, although) used to link ideas together.
Cracking creative homeworks
Each time we do a creative homework, the class pick five of their favourites. Here are this week’s top five:
Getting digital…
This morning we’ve been using laptops to write up some of our work from our English lessons. We’ve used our ICT skills to find a saved document on the school network, then open it, save it correctly and finally start to word process.
Happy and healthy… and busy!
A group of our Year 3 pupils were part of over one thousand children from across Leeds who took part in the Rugby World Cup Big dance Big sing event in Millenium Square.
Singing and dancing to the RWC theme tune ‘World in Union’, the event was to celebrate the upcoming RWC matches in Leeds this weekend.
- ‘I loved it and I tried my best.’
- ‘It was exciting when we did the dance.’
- ‘I enjoyed using the rugby balls for the dance and singing the song too.’
Earlier this week, our three lucky ticket winners to Saturday’s RWC match at Elland Road were announced.
Other upcoming events planned are the children’s Brownlee triathlon and another trip to the RWC fanzone in Millenium Square to take part in rugby activities and meet author Tom Palmer, who is writing a live story during the RWC.
We’re loving maths.
In addition to our Maths lessons each day, Y5 have a maths carousel on Mondays and Thursdays. We do a variety of maths-based activities that are fun, logical and allow us to practise our skills in a range of contexts.
Maths challenge table – This involves activities based on our current or previous learning. We can work independently and it often requires us to think differently or apply our learning in context.
Times tables – We practise our times tables independently and have come up with fun and creative ways of doing that on our own. (Below, we’re playing bingo.) There are sometimes maths puzzles to complete on the table we’re learning at the time too.
Maths puzzles – Can be anything but at the moment we are learning how to play Su-Doku, taking on the countdown challenge and completing logic puzzles in pairs.
Mathletics – We all love Mathletics and in the carousel we have the opportunity to use it in school, whether we want to go on Live Mathletics or complete activities.
West Yorkshire Playhouse workshop
We had a great time yesterday in our drama workshop. Two thespians from the West Yorkshire Playhouse led us through a series of drama games which focused on our class novel, ‘Fortunately, the Milk.’
In English we’ve been looking at conjunctions and prepositions (follow the links for more practice at home). We’ve used our Big Topic on holidays to inspire sentence writing.
At the beach….
The seaside has come to Year 2. Well, kind of. This is our holiday themed reading area. A great place to relax with a book. Just watch out for those pesky seagulls!
