Willow wb 9th January

Willow class have made a fantastic start to the new term and have come back to school showing that they are ready to learn and excited for our new topic. 

We have had a general focus on presentation and making sure that we are consistently taking care and showing pride in the way we present our class work. Our star learners for the week have demonstrated this brilliantly and everyone is making a conscientious effort to work on this. 

We have now introduced our new Topic which is based on The Golden Age of Islam. The children have produced fact files about the location of Baghdad which we are now going to develop further by exploring why Baghdad was a centre for trade. Our Art work is closely linked to our Topic and we have explored the different forms of Islamic Art. We identified calligraphy, vegetal patterns and geometric patterns as being the key forms and have used this information to produce a mood board in our sketch books. 

In Maths, our Year 3s have been focusing on multiples of ten and also started work on division. They have really impressed us with their reasoning skills and how they have set their work out so carefully. The Year 4s have been focusing on factors of numbers and we completed an activity which involved creating factor and multiple chains. They have worked hard to find factor pairs of a number as well defining the terms factor and multiple. 

Our text in Writing lessons is currently 'Journey' by Aaron Becker, This is a wordless picture book about a girl who draws a magic door and enters into an extraordinary world of magic and adventure. So far we have used this text to write sections of dialogue between characters, producing setting descriptions and looking closely at our use of regular and irregular verbs. 

In Science, we started our new unit all about States of Matter. We sorted different materials into solids, liquids and gases and talked about their properties. We also revisited how particles are arranged in solids, liquids and gases, following on from our sound work last term. We went outside and acted as the particles to help us remember the different arrangements. 

As part of our PSHE work on respecting differences, the children watched 'The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse'. We took each of the characters and identified their strengths and qualities and we came up with so many ideas. Some of these included being resilient, calm, trustworthy, fun, observant and being a positive role model. We then went on to identify our own strengths and qualities which led to lots of thoughtful discussion. 

It is lovely to be back into our routines and enjoying our learning together. We are looking forward to another busy week ahead.