Beech Tree Class Blog 2023-2024
Beech Tree Blog
Weekly Update-6/6/25
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, we have continued our adventure story unit of work that we started before the half term break. The children have spent the week writing their alternative adventure story which involves the main character of the story travelling back to a particular period in history. The children all voted for the period to be 1912, during the maiden voyage of the Titanic. The followed their five-part structures to create exciting adventure stories that included an introduction, a build-up, a dilemma, a resolution and a conclusion. Once they completed their writing, the children then revised and edited their pieces.
In maths, we have continued our unit of work on time, focusing on converting from analogue time to 12 hour digital, converting from analogue time to 24 hour digital and then converting from 24 hour digital time to 12 digital hour time and then also representing that in analogue time. The children have found this unit challenging; however, they’ve also been extremely resilient and made great progress with it.
In our reading, we have continued reading our class novel, which is Stig of the Dump. This week, we read the fifth chapter, titled The Snargets, and focused on retrieval, inference and summarising skills. We have also continued reading our story time book, which is called The Shop of Impossible Ice Creams and the children are absolutely loving it.
As part of our ALPT art exhibition, which is themed around Yorkshire, the children have taken inspiration from David Hockney’s digitally created paintings to create their own digital landscape paintings of Ilkley Moor.
The children also completed their multiplication tables assessments this week. They all tried very hard. Well done, everyone!
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou :)
Weekly Update-23/5/25
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, in maths, we have started our unit of work on time. This involved focusing on days, weeks, months and years, along with a focus on converting between analogue and 12-hour digital time and then also converting between 12-hour and 24-hour time.
As part of our reading this week, we focused on a Stone Age themed poem called I Was Born in the Stone Age by Michael Rosen. We discussed what the poem was all about and the children also really enjoyed that it was a funny poem as well. We then moved onto performing the poems, with a focus on intonation, varying the volume and varying the pace. The children also included actions when they performed them as well. They all really enjoyed it and it was lovely to see the different performances!
In writing, as part of our time travel adventure story, the children all voted on sending our main character back in time to 1912 on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. So this week, we have researched lots of facts about the Titanic and her ill fated voyage, focused on using inverted commas to create correctly punctuated lines of dialogue between our main character and Captain Smith, we have used descriptive words and phrases to describe the Titanic and the iceberg that she hit and our final lesson involved the children creating their plans for their story using a story mountain planner.
In computing, we have continued our work on programming events and actions. The children have absolutely loved this unit of work and produced some brilliant work throughout it. This week, we focused on debugging. The children were tasked with identifying the errors with the different lines of code and had to work out whether the code needed to be changed, removed or a new line of code needed to be added. The children were absolutely brilliant and really showed off how much they’ve learnt throughout this entire unit of work and were able to apply that knowledge with confidence to solve the problems.
Have a lovely week off and stay safe
Weekly Update-16/5/25
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
In our writing, we have started our new unit of work, which will still use the Stone Age Boy story as a launching point. Our new piece of writing will be an adventure story which will start off exactly how the original story does, with the boy falling down, but instead of ending up in the Stone Age, it will be at a completely different point in time. To start with, we looked a WAGOLL adventure story and identified a range of features that have been used within the story. We also looked at the structure of it as well to understand how you develop the story. Then, as a class, we came up with our ideas about which period of time we would like our main character to end up in. We had so many brilliant ideas, which included ending up in 1912 and being on the maiden voyage of Titanic and changing history by making sure it does not hit the iceberg and sink or ending up in Egypt in 1922 to discover Tutankhamun together with Howard Carter.
In our reading, we have continued to read Stig of the Dump, focusing on the fourth chapter. The children really enjoyed commentating and sharing their opinions about that they like about the story so far and why, what they dislike about the story so far and why, any questions they have about the story so far and any recurring patterns that they have noticed. We also focused on retrieval and inference skills, along with using a range of reading skills for 60 second reads.
In maths, we have been focusing on our unit of work on money. This week, we have been working on comparing amounts of money, estimating amounts of money, calculating money and solving problems with money by breaking down those tricky word problems by highlighting the key vocabulary and then using a range of mathematical operations to complete the multiple steps required to solve the problem.
In science, our lesson revolved around the human impact on habitats. This revolved around the negative and the positive impacts and generated a fantastic and stimulating class discussion. The children understood what human beings have done that has negatively impacted habitats and why that has occurred, but they also learnt about what can be done to repair the damage and how the area that has been disrupted due to human interference can be restored back to its original state. The children also learnt what human beings can do on a smaller scale as well which can have a positive impact on the habitat and the living things within it.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou :)