Week Ending 10 February
This week, as well as carrying on with our Maths learning and enjoying a ‘Break the Rules’ day, our main focus has been the drafting, designing and completion of our non-fiction writing pieces based on the text ‘Did Romans really eat flamingos?’. Our own class book, titled ‘Did Maserati really learn about the Romans?’, now has pride of place in our reading corner and below you can see some of the exceptional pieces of work the children created.
Week Ending 3 February
This week, we were very fort nature to be able to visit a local Italian school and meet some children who we will be inviting to our school in the coming months so we can learn more about each other and our cultures. We had a wonderful time getting to know the children and seeing what their school was like compared to our own.
In English this week, we have done lots of researching linked to our four chosen topics for our non-fiction class book about the Romans. The children could choose between the following topics: the great fire, gods and goddesses, Hadrian’s Wall and the tale of Romulus and Remus.
We were very fortunate to have two extra special treats this week in Maserati. The first was a Zoom call with a famous author, Sharna Jackson, which was done with lots of other schools. We were able to learn how she writes her books and hear about her life as well as being able to type questions to her for her to answer.
Then, we had a very exciting virtual meeting with a class in another MOD Schools school – Attenborough in Germany! The children there had started looking at the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius as part of their learning and asked us questions about what our lives were like living near there. It was lots of fun meeting them and hopefully we will get to work with them again in the future!
Week Ending 27 January
This week, the children have continued exploring the wonderfully wacky world of Julius Zebra and his friends as they end up trapped on a Roman ship on their way to Rome. As well as exploring vocabulary and phrasing in the book, we have been practising our retrieval question skills by finding importance information in the text.
In English this week, we have been writing letters as though we are Roman soldiers in Britain to the emperor telling him how we feel about withdrawing from Britain. As part of this, we have had to research the Roman withdrawal and consider the soldiers’ potential feelings and thoughts at the time.
In Maths, we have been continuing our multiplication and division work. Some children have focused on building up their knowledge and skills when using a range of different multiples while others have focused on multiplying and dividing numbers by 10 and 100.
We have also continued our ‘Dreams and Goals’ work in PSHE as well as having lots of fun in our PE session on base!
Week Ending 20 January
This week has been special week where we have been learning more about Dr Martin Luther King and his wonderful ‘I have a Dream’ speech. As part of our learning this week in English and Guided reading, we explored the language and imagery he used in his speech and then considered what we would want in our own world, before creating our own versions of this iconic speech. As well as this, we continued and finished our stories about the adventures of Dum Spiro.
We have been furthering our knowledge of the Romans by investigating what artefacts can teacher us about Roman life as well. Our artefact images were carefully explored and the children had to make annotations for their predictions about each object and comment on any identifiable features each had.
All of the children have continued to work on multiplication and division in maths this week as well, working very hard to use their times tables knowledge to help them solve a variety of different problems.
Week Ending 13 January
We have continued furthering our knowledge of Romans this week by exploring what life was like in a Roman fort this week, focusing on the new vocabulary in this text before going on to answer questions about it. We also investigated what life was like in Roman Britain, focusing on researching specific towns, and the ingenuity and inventions of the Romans. Continuing our Romans theme, we began exploring our new whole class book and guided reading text – Julius Zebra: Rumble with the Romans!
We have continued our work on addition and subtraction with some children this week by practising our use of column subtraction as well as beginning to use arrays to help us multiply and use multiples of our times tables. Our other children in class have been focusing on how to multiply and divide numbers by 1 and themselves in addition to multiplying three numbers together and using our knowledge of the multiples of a variety of numbers to answer questions.
As part of our work on ‘Dum Spiro’, we began the week by finishing our re-writes of the story opening we were given last week and they were definitely more exciting than the original version! To help us with our writing, we then looked at using the singular or plural possessive apostrophe so we could identify in our story who different items belonged to. As well, we recapped direct speech and what we needed to include to write out the conversation from the Dum Spiro video.
To further our understanding of plants, we explored the life cycle of a plant and identified and explained each stage of the cycle and why it is important.
Week Ending 6 January
The children came back to school this week with lots of enthusiasm for our continuing topic of ‘Emperors and Empires’, focusing on the Roman Empire and how it impacted Britain.
In English, we were inspired by a short animation film called ‘Dum Spiro’ where a Roman soldier is sent on a challenging mission to deliver a vital message. The children story mapped the beginning of the story and then had to create their own ending when the story stopped before its conclusion. They then explored an example story opening for the story and had to work with a partner or in groups to edit and improve the opening thinking about how we can make writing more exciting for the reader.
In Maths, some of our class has been continuing their work on addition and subtraction, concentrating on inverse operations and how we can use them to check our answers. Our other group have been focusing on recapping some of our times tables and considering how we can use our knowledge of them to problem solve.
As part of Guided reading, we have been exploring the text ‘Who were the Romans?’ and have both collaboratively and independently answered questions about the text. Further to this, we investigated why the Romans struggled to conquer Scotland and began to learn about Hadrian’s wall, creating some beautiful pop-up Hadrian’s walls of our own.
We have begun to explore plants as part of our science work and focused on identifying the function of different types of plants.