Hello and welcome to the first blog post of this academic year for Dolphin Class!
In our first full week of the term, we have been very busy engaging in lots of new learning and settling into the expected routines of upper key stage two.
Our English learning this week has seen us begin to plan and draft a character description for the main character of our new text, Rumaysa. We have looked at a WAGOLL, (what a good one looks like), and pulled the skills and features from this to make our writing amazing. We then moved on to planning our description under four headings - introduction, appearance, characteristics and actions/relationships. We investigated how engaging vocabulary in a variety of styles can hook the reader in and finished the week by practising the skill of relative clause use with relative pro-nouns. We know this as our sandwich skill, because the clause can be lifted out and the sentence still makes sense, just like bread and butter can still be eaten without the filling!
Our Maths learning has been based around place value this week. We have grown in confidence reading and writing numbers in numerals and words up to one million, before comparing and ordering them. We have then moved on to applying our place value knowledge to Roman Numerals as number representations. We built on our previous knowledge by learning the golden rule relating to partitioning and building numbers. You can only ever place a one, (I), or multiple of ten, X, L, C or M, (10, 50, 100 or 1000) before a number to subtract - so for example 945 would be partitioned into 900 + 40 + 5, which equates to CM + IV + V, so it would read CMIVV.
Our Science learning this week has seen us investigate gravity. We learnt the difference between mass and weight - mass is the weight of the things within and an object and measured in kilograms and grams, whereas weight is the pull of the gravitational pull of Earth and measured in newtons. We had great fun using newton meters to recognise the relationship between the two measurements.
Our History learning saw us begin our new topic, Early Islamic civilisation. We began by going back to the fourth century AD and looking at how the Romans created a western empire, based around Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinople after the Roman Emperor Constantine . Our Geography learning saw us investigate how North and South America are composed and their locations. We discussed things such as population and size, as well as their latitude relationships to other continents.
It has been an incredibly busy week, but the Dolphins have been marvellous learners, showing me how ready for Year Five they truly are. Well done to them all!
Have a lovely week,
Love from Dolphin Class. xx
Dolphins Week beginning 12/09/22
