As part of our Geography work on our local area, we went on a village walk to see some of the key features of our village. We saw places such as the school, church, village shop, the pub, war memorial, village hall, tennis club and the park. 

In year 5, we have finished our sentence stacking for "Float", which we are really proud of! Everyone has contributed at least a sentence to this fantastic version of the story. Now we are working on the first draft of our own stories, called "Glide", based on this model text, but using different ideas. We're looking forward to sharing our completed stories with you soon!

Last week year 5 visited Cokethorpe School to see a space science show called "Look up!", presented by Simon Watt. We really enjoyed learning more about space, especially thinking about how our solar system works. We also enjoyed being able to take part in the show, as seen in the photos below. Thank you very much to Cokethorpe School for inviting us!

We had a lovely morning celebrating Harvest. We began by singing a song called Busy for the Harvest busy_for_the_harvest.pdf. Then we took part in a variety of Harvest themed activities such as Harvest colouring pages and Harvest I Spy. We also looked at some books about fruit/ veg that is harvested, how plants grow and life on a farm. Our Harvest activities were brought to a close when Mary from the church group read a Harvest prayer for us. We thought carefully about how lucky we are to have such wonderful food and had reflection time to think about the foods that we are thankful for. 

As part of our Science work on Seasonal Change, we focused on the season of Autumn. We began our lesson by watching the video about Autumn and listening to the piece of music called Autumn by Vivaldi www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03npddx/melody-series-1-12-coat-of-leaves 

Then we got into pairs and went out into the school grounds to see if we could see the signs of Autumn on our checklist. We found items such as red leaves, orange leaves, blackberries, conkers and conker husks. We then collected Autumn leaves that had fallen to the ground to make our leaf hedgehogs back in class. 

Another busy week in Year 4. In Maths we have been continuing to work with 4 digit numbers - comparing them, ordering them in ascending and descending order, rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1000. 

In English we have been continuing our writing on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory working on developing noun phrases, adjectives and short sentences for impact. The children are rightly proud of their work and we were able to share some of it with the rest of the school during our Celebration Collective Worship on Friday. 

On Thursday we led our key stage collective worship for years 4, 5 and 6. We talked about thankfulness and harvest. In addition for saying thank you for the food we have to eat we thought about how telling our friends that we are grateful for them can help us to all to grow. 

In Science we have been creating classification keys for living things.  As part of our PSHE we have all created and signed up to our Class Standards. Try asking your child if they can remember what they include.  

Some of the children have reported difficulty in accessing the correct spelling list in Spelling Shed. We will look into this but in the meantime they have a paper copy and the spellings are listed below:

1. submarine
2. subject
3. subway
4. submerge
5. subtropical
6. subdivide
7. subheading
8. substandard
9. subtitle
10. submit

​​This week in English the children have been writing their own adventure stories; I have been really impressed with their determination to keep going with this longer piece of writing and I am looking forward to reading the finished pieces! 
In RE with Mrs Gold, the children came up with questions they would like to ask Noah. They then took turns to take the hot seat and answer them, proving their knowledge of the story from the last few weeks and using their imagination!
On Thursday it was National Poetry Day, to celebrate this we wrote acrostic poems based on the theme of Autumn. We started off by thinking of changes that happen in Autumn, colours we see outside and events that happen during this time. The children then had a go at writing their poems, and once they had finished they wrote them out neatly and illustrated them. I was really impressed with the finished products and how determined the children were to rise to the challenge of using similes! 
Unfortunately, Mrs Robertson, our violin and cello teacher, was unable to do the lesson this Friday so we haven’t been able to give the children their instruments to take home. Hopefully she will be with us next week and we can allocate the instruments to the children. All children were given a permission form this week, please return this to me or the office if you would like your child to practise their instrument at home.
This week’s spellings have been set on Spelling Shed; we will have a short test on Tuesday.
Words with endings that sound like /ze/, as in measure, are always spelled with ‘-sure’:
measure
treasure
pleasure
enclosure
displeasure
composure
leisure
exposure
closure
disclosure

This week we made Harvest cards to deliver with the Harvest parcels we will be delivering on Monday afternoon. The children used apples to print the shape of the pumpkin and then added the details using pipe cleaners, googly eyes and pens. Well done Thames Class for producing some lovely cards for the community. 

In Phonics this week we have been focusing on the 'or' and 'ur' digraphs. These lists have now been added to Spelling Shed. 

In Maths we have been using the <,> and = signs to compare numbers. We have also been ordering groups of objects. We have practised counting each object carefully to find the total number in the group.

We had a wonderful Science morning on Wednesday where we focused on the signs of Autumn. We went out into the school grounds to see if we could find the signs of Autumn that were on our checklist. We found signs such as red leaves, blackberries, conkers and conker husks. We then gathered some of the Autumn leaves that had fallen to the ground to use to make our Autumn leaf hedgehogs. 

Unfortunately our village walk was postponed again due to the poor weather. We will try to get out around the village again next Tuesday afternoon.