Sapphire news
Reading
In our class, we love reading. We start the day with reading and for a lot of us, it helps settle us for the day. We have been working hard to develop our fluency. This means we need to read with expression and not sound like a robot, we need to read with a clear voice and have good volume and we need to read at a good steady pace. It is important not to rush our reading otherwise we might miss out important information. We love the 1-minute challenge we have at the end of fluency. It is where we are given an extract to read (could be fiction, non-fiction or poetry) and we have to see how much of it we can read aloud in a minute. Some of the extracts are easy enough to fit into that time, but others can be quite tricky. We spend a few days on fluency and making sure we can answer questions about the texts we have read. We are also lucky that we get a few days where we can read whatever we want. We call it love of reading where we pick up any kind of book and enjoy. Some of the class go straight to the picture books, some choose to carry on reading their own personal books and others look to see what mysteries they can find in a graphic novel or myth atlas. We also share reading with each other by recommending books to our classmates. At the end of each day, Miss Tonner will read a chapter or two of our class story to us as well as a poem of the day.
Tweedy
In the last week of term, we were so lucky to have a visit from Tweedy! A lot of us had seen him perform at Gifford’s Circus or in the Pantomime at Cheltenham, but we had not seen him in our school before! He was so funny and had the whole school laughing for nearly an hour. He performed magic tricks like fixing a broken umbrella. He showed us some of his amazing circus skills like plate spinning, juggling and balancing on a wobble board while playing the accordion. He also read us his brand-new picture book about a clown who loses his nose. Afterwards, some of us had bought his book so we got them signed. We all really enjoyed ourselves and we hope he comes to visit again.
English
We have really enjoyed reading and learning about the book Planet Omar by Zanib Mian. It’s such a good book that is funny as well as a book that makes you think. We have learnt about the religion of Islam as the main characters are Muslims. We wrote information texts about mosques and Ramadan. We have had to identify as one of the main characters and write diary entries as them. One of the themes of the book is discrimination as there is a boy called Daniel who discriminates against Omar because of his religion. We wrote speeches to say why we need to fight against discrimination and how we can all do our part to be more accepting of anyone who is different. We agreed that differences should be celebrated. Our favourite piece that we wrote was when Miss Tonner gave us the chance to write in the style of the author. We could write our own chapters using the characters from the book, and we could have anything happen as long as it was in keeping with how Zanib Mian writes her books. We would really recommend this book!
Science
This term we have been looking at electricity in science. We have spent the past few weeks learning about the different parts of circuit and then experimenting with them to see what we can make work. In our last lesson, we had to problem solve. We were given tasks where we had to predict whether or not the circuit would work just by looking at the list of equipment. Once we had made our predictions, we then made the circuit to see whether we were correct or not. Some of the tasks were obvious to figure out as they had no power in the form of a cell or battery so we knew straight away that they wouldn’t work. Others were not so obvious so it took a bit of problem solving to work out the answers.
