English
We are looking at the poetry from The Lost Spells by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. Jackie Morris was our artist focus last term and we looked at some of her work from this book as inspiration for our Art pieces. One of the poems studied was ‘Jackdaw’ which was great. We wrote our own versions of the poem which we then had to perform. Jackdaws are known for being noisy birds so we had to imagine what it would be like if they could actually talk and have a conversation with each other. Quite a few of us imagined them as chatterboxes and wisecrackers so our poems definitely reflected that. We then looked at the ‘Oak’ poem which was all about different trees and what they experienced. Our first attempt at writing a tree poem was coming up with different characteristics for trees. Here are some of our favourite lines:
The whispering tree shared secrets.
The crying tree weeped for the forgotten.
The laughing tree roared at the joke.
The manipulating tree twisted tales.
The sleeping tree dreamed of times gone by.
Art
Our final pieces are complete and now on display. We found it hard to draw with inks without any pencil reference. We surprised ourselves though with how good the final pieces looked. Some of us actually preferred drawing with inks instead of using pencils as we found it more freeing to just get on with the piece. Of course, the more we practiced this skill, the more confident we became. A few of the class said that they wanted to do this more often and that drawing/painting with inks was their favourite thing to do.
DT
We have begun our DT unit investigating flood proofing buildings. It is linked to our climate change geography unit. So far we have looked at where severe flooding has happened across the world, how a community can protect itself from flooding and how many different ways a building can be floodproofed. Some buildings are built high off the ground, others have built in floatation devices and some have impenetrable walls that water can’t break through. The next thing we will look at is testing materials to see which ones would be best to build with as we have to work in groups to make a flood proofed structure.
Maths
We have been learning how to use our times tables to help us divide. It was tricky for some of us because we are still learning times tables, but we were allowed to use the times table square and numicon to help us. We have learnt a new method called short division. We needed to work out how many groups could be made from a number and if there would be any remainders. This has helped us to understand how to find a fraction of a number.
Geography
Over the past few weeks we have been looking at the impact of global warming on our planet. The first lesson of the term was all about the differences between sea ice melting and the shelf ice from the land melting. We replicated this using ice cubes to represent the different ices. We soon noticed that the ice that was sitting in the sea melted, but the sea levels didn’t rise that much. But the ice that melted from the land and travelled into the sea forced the sea level to rise quite a bit, in some cases even causing flooding on the land. This showed us that the melting ice we need to be worried about is the ice sheets. We’ve also looked at wildfires and where hey have occurred across the world.
Science
We are looking at plants. Miss Tonner gave each of us a daffodil to dissect and investigate all of the different parts that make up a flower. We learnt what the stigma, style, anther, sepal, petal, ovary and stem all did. We are going be looking at pollination and seed dispersal over the next few weeks.
