Term 1 Week 4 – overview

Our ukulele lessons with Mr Lawrence will continue this week.  Ukuleles are provided by the school.

Spelling and grammar – we will be practising words from the year 3 and 4 statutory spelling list.  We will also be working on adverbs of frequency and of manner.

In English, we will be beginning a new text called Escape from Pompeii, by Christina Ballit.  This ties in with our history enquiry, ‘What did the Romans do for us?’.  We will begin by exploring the story setting at the start, thinking about all the senses.  We will be creating a bank of sensory description and writing our own short descriptive piece.   We will then move on to explore language related to the earth tremors described in the book, and using a thesaurus, we will collaboratively write a poem and perform it to the class.  We will then explore powerful verbs to describe what could have happened to buildings in Pompeii during an earth tremor.

In Maths, we will continue with place value, working on estimating on a number line to 10,000, comparing and ordering numbers to 10, 000 and understanding Roman numerals.    On Thursday we dedicate time to working on our personal times tables targets.  Regular, short burst practise at home will really support this.

This term we will be studying a unit on Creation in RE.  We have already discussed the Biq Question ‘what do Christians learn from the creation story?’ and this week will focus weighing up 8 statements and deciding which we feel represents the message most and least.  We will also be justifying our choices.

In terms 1 and 2, we will be studying Roman Britain.  Our area of enquiry is based on the question: ‘What did the Romans do for us?’  This week, we will learn about the attempts to invade Britain and how and why the Romans were eventually successful.

In Science, we will be investigating sound over the next few weeks.  This week we will be investigating volume, vibration and sound waves by setting up an experiment and recording results.  We will then plot these results on a graph and draw some conclusions.

In Computing, pupils will be exploring what the internet and world wide web are.  This will also involve discussion on how to be safe online.

PE lessons are on Tuesday morning with Mrs Barter and Thursday afternoon with Mrs Tompsett.  This term we will be developing ball skills and invasion techniques in football and basketball.  

Reading records will be sent home, with free-reading children choosing a book from the selection in class or bringing one from the reading scheme.  All children have an additional book in their tray for reading sessions in class.  Please could we have reading records in school to be checked on Tuesday and Friday mornings.  

Homework is issued on Wednesday and is due in the following Monday morning.  It will usually consist of a Maths activity and an English activity based on what we have been learning in class.  One of these will be online, using the Purple Mash platform.  Pupils have new usernames and passwords this year, which have been stuck into the front of their homework books.

Please contact me if you have any queries using the class email address:

chestnut@st-barnabas.kent.sch.uk

Have a lovely week!

Best wishes,

Mrs Barter