English

In English this week we have read some more of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and met some more of the characters. This gave us a fantastic opportunity to write some character descriptions. The children have learnt that when they describe a character they should use a range of prepositions to add detail to where the thing is they are describing e.g. underneath his small, chubby nose, Augustus Gloop has a chocolate smothered mouth. They have also learnt to use adverbs in their description, both before and after a verb e.g. Veruca Salt selfishly snatched the ticket from her father, Veruca Salt stopped stroppily as she asked her father if he had found her a golden ticket. We then looked at using fronted adverbials to start sentences in our character descriptions. For example, At night, Violet Beauregarde takes her gum out and puts it on the bedpost! Rapidly, her jaw moves up and down, up and down as she chews the special gum. Lastly, we have been writing compound sentences in our descriptions using FABOYS conjunctions (for, and, but, or, yet, so) e.g. Mike Teavee is a very lazy boy for he always sits watching the TV for hours! Next week, we will be writing in role as characters in the story, ensuring we write in the first person and using emotive language to show viewpoint.

Maths

This week we have been adding and subtracting. In addition, we looked for patterns in calculations and used these to work out what a calculation further on in the pattern would be. This is preparing the children for learning about the nth term later in KS2. For example, 12+5=    12+10=    12+15=    12+20 =    What are the answers to these calculations? What will the next calculation be in the pattern and what will the answer be? The children have also been learning about the inverse relationship between addition and subtraction and generating inverse calculations to match e.g. what is the inverse calculation to 62+16=78? The children have also represented these in an inverse triangle. Lastly, the children have learnt to represent additional dn subtraction calculations in bar models. Next week, we are moving on to learn about division. We will be using counters to solve division problems using the bar model and part, part whole model and also learning how to share items that will result in each person getting a fraction of the object e.g. 5 cakes shared between 10 children, each child will get half a cake.

Topic

We have begun our new topic this week called From Bean to Bar which is all about chocolate! The children thoroughly enjoyed our entry point where they took part in a blind taste test of different types of chocolate. They had to taste the chocolate without looking and write down the flavour of the chocolate that they thought it was. Here they are enjoying this task...

Next, we learnt about the history of chocolate. The children discovered that the Mayan and Aztec civilisations lived in Central and South America and they were the first people to use cocoa beans to make a chocolate drink. The children learnt how to show these events in chronological order in a storyboard. We then finished the week learning about the explorers from Spain, Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes, who bought cocoa beans back to Europe. The children hot seated as Hernan and then took part in a role play pretending Hernan Cortes was meeting Montezuma, the King of the Aztecs. Here are some photos of their hot seating and role play....