A big well done to Thames Class for hosting a fantastic Macmillan Coffee Morning! The children were excellent hosts and raised a fantastic amount of money, the total will be revealed very soon. 

Year 4 dodged the downpours on Friday afternoon to search for minibeasts on the back field to help us classify and identify invertebrates as part of our work on Living things and their habitats in Science. We used classification keys to help us identify the invertebrates using their characteristics. We then chose one of the minibeasts to draw and describe in greater detail. We learnt that woodlice are crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. 

We have been using some active maths to help us practise partitioning 4-digit numbers.

.We had fun boosting our fitness with an extra workout on National Fitness Day.

We really enjoyed joining together in the hall to celebrate National Fitness Day 2019. We completed one of The Body Coach 5 minute work outs and the Mario Just Dance. We hope that you were able to take part in something active that day too. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3LPrhI0v-w

​www.youtube.com/watch?v=39L-M5nhx6Y

​We’ve had a great first few weeks in Windrush Class! The children have settled well and have made a great start to Year 3!

In English we have been reading The Secret of Black Rock and have used this book to inspire our writing. We have finished all of our sentence stacking lessons and the children are now working on planning their own adventure stories. I have been really impressed with their creative and well-thought-out plans and I’m looking forward to reading the finished stories at the end of next week!

On Friday we finished our first maths unit of work on Place Value. The children have been working really hard in our maths lessons and have particularly enjoyed our Active maths lessons outside! Next week we will be starting our new unit, Addition and Subtraction.

Last week, in our History lessons we learnt about Stone Age cave paintings; we learnt about how they made the paint, which tools they painted with, and what the painting could have meant. We then had a go a creating our own cave paintings; the children’s paper was stuck under their tables and they used charcoal to draw their designs in order to experience some of the challenges Stone Age people may have experienced when painting the ceilings of caves. In our next lesson the children had another go at creating a cave painting; however, this time they used sticks, leaves and their finger, with paint, so that they could experience using similar painting tools to Stone Age people.

Last Friday morning we had our first music lesson with the violins and cellos. The focus of the lesson was on safely taking the instrument out of its case, holding the instrument in the correct position and having a go at playing a simple tune. I was extremely impressed with how well the children listened to Mrs Robertson, our strings teacher, and how quickly they picked up on everything. This week we learned how to play using the bow and we also learnt some different tunes to play. I will be sending a permission form home next week so that next week the children will be able to take their instruments home to practise.
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This week’s spellings have been set on Spelling Shed; we will have a short test on Tuesday.
The /i/ sound spelled ‘y':
gym
myth
Egypt
pyramid
mystery
symbol
synonym
lyrics
system
gymnastics

In Phonics this week we have been focusing on the long 'oo' (as in moon) and short 'oo' (as in book). These word lists along with the Phase 2 sounds and other Phase 3 sounds that we have practised so far in Year 1 have been put onto Spelling Shed. 

Please can homework books be returned into class on Tuesdays so that we can get the next homework notes stuck into the books ready to be sent out on Fridays. 

Unfortunately our village walk for our local area Geography focus was postponed due to the heavy rain. We are hoping to do the walk next Tuesday if the weather is kinder! 

In Maths this week we have been comparing groups and using key vocabulary such as more/ less than and equal to. We will be moving on to look at using symbols for comparing numbers next week.

As part of our work on Harvest in RE, we focused on how the Jewish faith celebrates Harvest. We learnt about the Jewish Harvest Festival of Sukkot and saw photos of Sukkah's. We then worked together to create our own Sukkah in our class role play area. We are looking forward to enjoying some meals in it next week. 
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Dear parents and carers,

I am so proud of how hard the children have worked this week. They completely surprised me this week by working so incredibly hard in English that we actually fitted what I thought would take two lessons into one! That means that we have finished our sentence stacking section of work based on Float, and are now working on planning our own versions of the story, where the events are flipped. Our stories will be called Glide, and will be about a child who goes outside to play with a paper plane. The children have now done their rough planning for this, so next week we will work on expanding this planning, considering whether the story step has positive or negative intent, and how to include the features that I will be looking for.

I am also really pleased with how well the children are doing with their spellings, as I can tell that lots of effort is going into learning them. Well done to you all! This week's spellings all have -cial in them:

• official
• special
• artificial
• crucial
• judicial
• beneficial
• facial
• glacial
• especially
• multiracial

In maths this week we have finished working on our place value unit, where we covered more rounding (with even larger numbers!) and we also recapped our knowledge of negative numbers. Next week we'll be looking at column methods for addition and subtraction, which builds on the children's place value knowledge.

I am really looking forward to taking the children to Cokethorpe next Thursday for the space science show. We'll be eating our packed lunches at 12 before Cokethorpe pick us up in their bus at 12.30pm, so please remember your child's packed lunch on that day!

Mrs B
Three things to ask your child this week:

1. ​How have ideas about the way the solar system works changed over time?
2. How do negative numbers work?
3. How are you going to change the Float story into Glide?