What we are doing this week in Lilac Class

In Maths this week in Lilac Class, we will be continuing with our work on place value.  We will be working with numbers up to one million.  Not only are we going to be ordering and comparing these very large numbers and recognising the value of their digits, we will also be rounding them to the nearest 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000.

In English, we are continuing with our work about ‘Journey’ by Aaron Becker, St. Barnabas’s whole school text.  Our writing task this week is to level up and improve our ‘character profile’ writing of the girl (the central character in the story).  We have transformed this work on character into a diary account.  We have really focused on the girl’s feelings and emotions at the beginning of the book and the reasons why we believe that she decided to leave her family and enter an enchanted world.   We are now up to Chapter Four of ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’, our class guided reading text this term.  When we are answering our comprehension questions we are continuing to make predictions about the story, summarising parts of the text and learning to ‘think out of the box’ or to ‘infer’.  We are thinking about why a character does what they do in the text or what they maybe feeling and why.  It is important that we support our answers with evidence from the text. 

In RE, the unit we are studying this term is entitled ‘God’.  This week, we are exploring God in relation to these key words:  omnipotent, omniscient, spiritual, holy, eternal, loving and caring.  We will be discussing the meaning of these words in depth and why we believe these describe God and what he does. 

In Topic, we will be learning about and looking carefully at some examples of Mayan art.  We will be finding out about what their art was about and why they used such bright colours.  Using this information, we will be creating our own designs based on themes and colours that can be found in the artwork of the Ancient Maya.  In Science, we are going to be learning about key vocabulary and what they mean linked to the Sun and Moon.  For example, corona, plasma, craters and plains.  We will also be completing a ‘fact file’ booklet about ‘Earth and Space’.  This will be done during our ICT lesson when we will have the opportunity to research information using laptops.  In Music, we will be learning about the instruments of the orchestra and how an orchestra is set out.  We are also going to be listening to ‘Mars’ and ‘Venus’ from Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets Suite’, recording the different musical sounds we hear using ‘graphic notation’ (symbols and patterns that describe music).