Year 3

The children have achieved an amazing amount in their first full week back after half-term. This week, we put our archaeologists' hats on and went back in time to The Stone Age! We discovered that artefacts tell us about how people lived in BCE and even analysed the very first cave drawings from the South of France, 30,000 years ago! We imagined we were in the Stone Age and began writing diary entries, recording our thoughts and feelings (and Woolly Mammoth sightings!). Building on our place value knowledge, year 3 have been developing their exchanging skills when using formal column addition and subtraction to solve maths challenges. Implementing manipulatives to support our learning, such as place value counters and dienes has helped the children to gain confidence. The children learnt about the invention of the telephone, and explored how sound travels through vibrations. They loved experimenting with their ‘cup and string telephones’, and discovered how pulling the string tightly would help the sound to travel.

Key Messages

• Key vocab: prehistory, hunter-gatherer, nomadic, shelter, light source, visibility

• KIRFs: Can I recall the 3 times table facts? (Starting next week)

• Spellings: -ation (suffix, e.g. preparation). 

• On Mondays, please bring to school: 

  • 1. Purple homework spelling book

  • 2. Reading record (to be brought every day!)

  • 3. ‘Big Cat’ book to be swapped for a new book

Year 4

This week has been very busy for Year 4. In Maths, we have been learning to use inverse calculations to check our workings out. We will soon be moving on to our new topic of ‘area’. In English, we have been continuing to look at the features of non-chronological reports with a specific focus on sentence structure and using a variety of sentence types in our writing. We have started our new topic of Romans & Celts, which we kicked off with a really fun lesson involvingtoilet roll. The children placed key events in Roman and Celtic history on a timeline. Then, they considered which events were the most significant and added them to their own toilet roll timeline. In Science, we have been considering how animals are adapted to live in their environments. The children have been shown animals which they haven't seen before, identified its features and predicted which habitat they think it lives in.

Key Messages

• Key vocab: inverse, commutative, CE, BCE, adaptation

• KIRFs: Please continuing doing TTRS regularly - our focus in the 6 times tables

• Spellings: adding the prefix inter-