Hello and welcome to 5W’s blog of the week!

Maths

This week in maths the children have started work on fractions. We started the week by another method, the ‘bus stop’ method to divide. The children used 2, 3, 4 and even 5 digit numbers to divide by a number, some answers even leaving remainders. Very clever stuff indeed! Next we moved onto fractions, and it became apparent that quite a bit in maths comes down to knowing your times tables, so lots of practice at home please! The children looked at finding fractions of shapes that were shaded and then shading fractions of shapes. After that, the children moved onto finding fractions of amount, such as 1/3 of 12 and 2/5 of 20. It’s easy if you remember the song ‘You divide by the bottom, then you times by the top’. The children will be fraction crazy come this time next week.

Have a play on this website at home and test your ‘bus stop’ method knowledge.

http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks2/maths/school_booster/busstopdivision.html

English

During this half term the children will be basing their work around ‘Wordless’ books. This is basically a book with no words! The children really have to use their imaginations to think about the stories in the books and create ideas for themselves. We started the week by looking at using commas, brackets and dashes for parenthesis, very tricky work indeed! Next, we introduced our first wordless book ‘Tuesday’. While looking through the pictures in the book it became apparent that on Tuesdays something very magical seems to happen…animals start to fly! As the book has no words, the children were set the challenge of writing the opening to the book. Using super sentences and lots of literary features in their writing to describe the setting and atmosphere.

Science

Our topic for this half-term in science is ‘Forces’. We started the week by introducing our new topic and the children created an introduction mind-map to show everything they already knew about forces and what they would like to find out by the end of the topic. In our next session, we focused on one area of forces, gravity (which we have looked at before in our previous topic). The children learned that gravity is all around us, it is what keeps us on the ground, but we cannot see it. The children learnt that it was Sir Isaac Newton that discovered gravity, when an apple fell on his head when sat under a tree. Towards the end of the week we looked at how we measure the force of gravity on certain objects. The children used a newton/force meter to measure a variety of objects inside and outside of the classroom, to see which objects has the biggest and smallest force.

Topic

This half term in topic we will be studying ‘Wordsworth and Wainwright’. William Wordsworth and Alfred Wainwright are two key historical figures that have strong likes with the Lake District. This week we introduced the topic and discussed the difference between the Lake District and Wigan. The children then created a mind map of all the things they think we might learn during this half-terms topic and questions that they would like to learn and find out.

Well done to our certificate winner this week, Rhys F for having a much better attitude to learning this week and behaviour. Well done Rhys!

Finally, all that is left to say is I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I will see you bright and early on Monday morning.