2nd October 2021

We've had an exciting first month in Birch Class. Here's some of our highlights of our mornings:

In English, we have been learning about persuasive writing by building up our skills to write a brochure for the Nothing to See Here Hotel, the perfect holiday vacation for monsters. We have investigated other brochures and discovered what makes people want to go to these places. Our word wheel helped us to build up our adjectives and helping to fix parts of Miss Simpson's brochure has helped Birch Class understand the importance of punctuation, questions and professional language in persuasive writing. This past week, we have finished writing and editing our first drafts and learned how to use sentence starters to create different sentences, ready to move on to our second draft.

In maths, the topic is place value. We have learned about numbers up to a million and how to round to the nearest 10, 100 and 1,000 within that. We have explored number sequences in the powers of ten and which numbers change when we do. This past week, we discovered negative numbers and how to mark them on number lines. On Monday, we'll be wrapping up our place value topic by looking at roman numerals including how to write the date and use them in calculations.

In the afternoons, we are joined by the Year 6 students in Maple Class. Here's what we have been learning about in some of our lessons:

Our science topic is separating mixtures. We started off with a recap on solids, liquids and gases and what they look like in their molecules look like. Our very first experiment expored at the ways different mixtures interacted by first predicting what we thought would happen by drawing the molcules in beakers and then mixing them together. The class were most excited about the way oil sat on top of water rather than mixing together. This past week we learned about alloys and how mixing weak metals like copper and tin together can create stronger metals like bronze. Not to mention the most successful alloy being steel, a mixture of carbon and iron. 

In history, we have been learning about medieval monarchs. We started in 1066 with an exploration into the three contendors for the throne after Edward the Confessor and a dramatic retelling of the Battle of Hastings which saw William the Conqueror take the throne. The second monarch we looked at was Henry II, who fought with Thomas Becket, the church and even his own sons. This past week, we got to meet two of his sons: Richard Lionheart and King John 'Lackland' and we discussed whether one was truly better than the other. Every new monarch we learn about, we consider what made them a good king and what made them a bad king.