Autumn One Update

Admirals have had an excellent, productive first half term back to school. They have settled back into their routines and have shown me just what enthusiastic, reflective learners they are! This half term has been packed full of learning and lots of amazing opportunities.

This half term, in English, we have been enjoying a couple of fantastic, high quality texts, including The Book of Mythical Beasts and Magical Creatures and Cloud Tea Monkeys. Our first unit on non-chronological reports saw us learning about how to inform our reader about a mythical creature of our own design. We used new and ambitious vocabulary to describe its appearance, diet, habitat and evidence of sightings. We then read the beatifically descriptive Cloud Tea Monkeys and worked on a number of grammar areas including fronted adverbials, figurative language, expanded noun-phrases and how to link through paragraphs. This led us to our final extended write where we took a section of the story and retold it in our own words.

In maths, we have tackled the hugely important unit on place value. The children have ordered numbers, placed them on number lines, predicted mystery numbers and rounded them too! The children have persevered when faced with new learning and challenges and have demonstrated our new learning skills brilliantly! We moved onto exploring negative numbers. We learnt about where we would find them in a real life context, how to add and subtract negative numbers and how to read different intervals in scales. More recently, we have been learning how to divide and multiply by 10, 100 and 1,000. The children used speaking frames to support their understanding of the number growing larger or smaller and exactly how the digits move through the place value columns.

History, this term, has been centred on the Maya Civilisation. We explored how the Maya lived and how this is different from how they may live today. We learnt all about the occupations they had and the different types of food and drink they ate. We travelled back in time to look at famous sketches of the different pyramids and temples and wrote diary entries, writing as if we had been exploring the famous ‘Lost Jungle Cities.’ Following this we learnt exactly what each of the impressive structures was used for. These included sacrifice sites, bathing pools and columns to observe the stars and phases of the moon. We finished our unit by playing the infamous Pok-A-Tok game and drank chilli hot chocolate! What fun!

In computing, we have been learning about electronic systems and sharing information. We studied how these complex systems work and where we would find them in the outside world. We created teddy bears with different complex systems inside of them and studied important systems like pelican and puffin crossings. We then looked at sharing information effectively and created a shared PowerPoint on some under recognised, influential black people practising viral skills in communication. 

 In PE, the children have also been practising their skills in handball and now have great control over the ball. They have also been developing their sportsmanship in tag rugby, which is lovely to see.

In science, we have studied living things and their habitats. We found out how living things are sorted by observable characteristics and that scientists all over the world observe them, and ask questions to find out about these species. We looked particularly and Jane Goodall and David Attenborough. We also learnt all about pollination and how pollinators are vital for our environment to flourish and produce fruit and vegetables for us to eat. We learned about the difference between sexual and asexual reproduction in plants, and researched the gestation periods of different animals. We are looking forward to our trip to the Tring Natural History Museum in November.

In art, Mrs Khaleed supported the children with experimenting with mixed colours on our rollers and what it would look like if we overlapped the prints.

In DT, we developed our sewing skills further by creating a small stuffed toy. After designing our toy, we revised our use of running stitch to attach appliqué and blanket stitch to sew the sides our toys. The results were impressive!

 In RE, we learnt all about commitment. We looked at the key question, ‘How far would a Sikh go for their religion.’ We looked at some of their core beliefs and then learnt about examples of how modern Sikhs might demonstrate these today. We also held our own Langar in our classroom to get a sense of the equality and selfless duty that may Sikhs show in a Gurdwara. We practised our oracy skills in our discussions and had to express our opinions clearly and confidently.

In PSHE, we began our first topic ‘Being Me in My World.’ We explored our hopes and dreams for the upcoming term and moved on to learn all about children’s rights. We explored everybody’s rights to be safe, have access to clean water, a safe place to live and the right to learn. We thought about our rights at school and how we can all show responsibility by upholding these rights. Additionally, we celebrated Hello Yellow Day and Black History Month.

Your children have worked so hard this half term and have lived by our Margaret Wix values. I hope you enjoy a restful break Admirals, and I look forward to seeing you soon!

Mrs Smith