Mr Applegate

Overview

What a busy few weeks we have had in Year 5. The children have immersed themselves in our topic – Globe Trotting Around North America – and have been learning about all the differences that can be found across the continent including the biomes that can be found there, the land use and the different ways that different tribes have lived depending on their origin.

Big News! We have our class ‘State-Off’ coming up next week so would love the children to practise naming as many of the 50 states from the USA as they can. Which class will be victorious? We will find out soon! 

English 

‘The Midnight Fox’ by Betsy Byars is a traditional tale set in North America and we have been focusing our English all around this book. The children are currently rewriting the story from the fox’s perspective but last week, they wrote the most exceptional letters!

In the story, Uncle Fred goes fox hunting and when the children were faced with a recent newspaper report about fox hunting, they become so passionate about the topic! The children learned that Jeremy Hunt MP wanted to have a free vote on whether the ban on fox hunting should remain or be lifted and they wrote persuasive letters to him to encourage him to either leave the ban in place, or allow a free vote on the issue, depending on their own personal opinion. Please see some outstanding examples below.

Design Technology

As mentioned above, the children have been learning about the different tribes that live, and have lived, across North America. They have learned about how, depending on their origin, these people lived in homes ranging from teepees to igloos, lived on everything from deer to seals and wore a range of clothing and colours. From this research, the children have begun designing and completing their own weaves. Here are a few examples from last week.

We are excited to share the children’s other pieces of artwork with you at the end of term and hopefully some of their stories too. Look out for our final website update for 2020! We are so proud, as always, of how hard the children are working and particularly with how hard they have worked in their assessments over the last few days. Their results will be shared with you soon when you receive their end of term reports. 

Many thanks, 

The Year 5 Team

The Greatest Fire in history

Year 2 have enjoyed learning about the Great Fire of London over the past few weeks. They are now experts and can answer questions about when, where, how and why the fire started. Do use our Knowledge Organiser to test them on the facts and see how much they know. They can also tell you what happened after the fire and what lessons were learnt. Do ask them why Samuel Pepy’s buried his cheese too! We think you’ll be amazed with how much they have learnt. We are incredibly proud of them all! The children have completed wonderful art work linked with our topic and have created some informative non-chronological reports to share with you. We think they are amazing!

Hey Ewe!

Year 1 and 2 are excited to be creating a video of our nativity play ‘Hey Ewe’ to share with you for Christmas. We are already getting ready and practising in our classes. This will be recorded in our class bubbles and then put together by the magic of technology! Your child should have brought home a letter and some lines today. This will tell you which character they are and give a guide for a simple costume. The children need to come in wearing these on Wednesday 2nd December please. We really don’t want you to go to any extra expense so please let your class teacher know if you have any difficulties with these costumes as we are sure we can suggest an alternative. If your child has lines, we would ask you to practise these with them as much as you can (including you reading the previous line so that they know when to come in). We only have a very short period of time to rehearse due to the extra time that it will take to edit and assemble recordings from 6 classes. We appreciate your support with this and hope you will look forward to the results.  

In Year 1, we have continued to enjoy our Polar Explorer project. We have been finding out lots of information about polar animals this last week and will be using this to help us write our own information books about penguins and polar bears. We enjoyed a talk yesterday from Mrs Stonehouse, who told us about her own adventures when she visited the penguins in Antarctica. The children all loved finding out about the different penguins there. We have also been finding out about the Inuit people who live in the Arctic and we enjoyed creating our own clothing designs for them.

In maths, we have been learning about adding and subtracting small numbers within 10 and representing these using tens frames, part-whole models and number sentences. The children are continuing to practice making numbers in different ways and use these to help with their addition and subtraction.

Reminders:

• Spellings: these are being put onto Google Classrooms each week. Please try and encourage your child to learn these and then send a picture back of their learning or click the ‘submitted’ button, so we know they have done their homework.
• Tapestry: an email was sent out last week from the Year R team letting you know of a link for you to download your child’s tapestry work. Please do this as soon as possible, before your child’s account is deactivated.

For any questions or queries please email the Year 1 team on year1@stmarksce.org.uk

Thank you

Year 1 

The children are thoroughly enjoying our project based around the Iron Man. In science we have been using magnets to investigate their uses. We have watched how they have a magnetic force and can make a paperclip jump towards it. We have also made our own predictions and then investigated moving a paperclip through different materials in preparation  for making our mazes. Last week we finished our sentence stacking lessons and reread the stories we had created. We were extremely impressed! We went on to write the next section of the story on our own and have some created some poems using fabulous vocabulary where the Iron Man is Trapped. We will be writing these up next week and will share with you after. The children really have enjoyed reading The Iron Man and have created some wonderful art work from this too. 

A few updates: 

• There is still time to buy your copy of The Iron Man on sco pay – the children that have purchased them will be bringing them home soon. 
• The classes are preparing for our Christmas videos and the children are excited. Please check your child’s google classroom stream as we have put information on here as to any props or clothing they may need to be in for the recording day in school. These are different in all three classes so please check carefully. 
• Homework and spellings continues on google classroom. Don’t forget you can also access the children’s reading logs on here and there are reading prizes available for the children. 

Year 3 Team