It has been another busy and productive week in Lime Class, with both our Year 3 and Year 4 children settling brilliantly into their learning. In English, Year 3 have been revisiting a familiar text, thinking carefully about the vocabulary that makes writing interesting and effective. They have been selecting some of the best words and phrases from the original text and then using them to help build their own paragraphs, focusing on clear sentences, exciting vocabulary and making sure their ideas flow together. It has been lovely to see the children becoming more confident at remembering and reusing effective vocabulary in their own writing. Year 4 pupils wrote diary entries, focusing on describing characters’ feelings and using suitable conjunctions to link their ideas. Their writing was inspired by the fascinating book, Oranges in No Man’s Land by Elizabeth Laird.
In Maths, we have continued our work on place value. Year 3 have been working with numbers to 1,000, while Year 4 have been extending their understanding to numbers up to 10,000. We have been busy partitioning numbers into thousands, hundreds, tens and ones, and then recombining them to make the whole number again. The children have also been representing numbers in different ways and placing them accurately on number lines, helping them to develop a strong sense of where numbers belong and how they relate to one another.
Our Science learning has taken some of us inside the human body as Year 3 have been learning about the human skeleton. The children labelled some of the major bones in their science books and then had the rather more unusual experience of labelling them on themselves using Post-it notes! This hands-on activity helped everyone to think about where the different bones are located and how our skeleton provides support and protection for our bodies. The year 4 children played a fun game of snap to help them learn to classify vertebrates in different ways depending on their features.
In Geography, we have been developing our map skills while learning about the countries that make up the United Kingdom and the main seas surrounding the British Isles. The children have been using maps carefully to locate and identify different geographical features.
We have also enjoyed some thoughtful PSHE discussions about the special people in our lives, considering what makes someone special to us, how they make us feel happy and the different ways we can make other people feel valued and cared for.
In Art, we have been developing our observational drawing skills by sketching a three-dimensional sphere. The children experimented with soft pencils and shading to create areas of light and dark, helping their flat drawings to look much more rounded and realistic.
At the end of the week we also had the important job of listening to speeches from our Year 6 school captain candidates before taking part in our own democratic election. The children listened carefully to the candidates’ ideas, made their choices and cast their votes – a wonderful opportunity to experience democracy in action.
