Beech Tree Class Blog 2023-2024
Beech Tree Blog
Weekly Update-7/5/26
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, in our writing, the children have completed their biographies about Howard Carter, they have edited them and they have published them. They have put a tremendous amount of effort into these pieces of writing, and they were a joy to read. The children have been so keen to learn more about him, Tutankhamun and ancient Egypt.
In reading, we have continued reading the next two chapters of The Cat Mummy by Jacqueline Wilson. The book deals with lots of serious themes and it has created lots of good discussions amongst the class when we have been commentating and sharing our opinions about what we like and dislike and what questions we have about the story, the characters, the themes, the author’s choices and inspirations for the book.
In science, we have planned our plant themed experiment which is focused around whether the number of seeds planted in a pot will affect the way that they grow. The children learnt all about the equipment they will use and how they will conduct the experiment in a fair way in order to produce reliable results.
As part of our first two lessons in our art unit based on ancient Egypt, the children have been learning about and using a range of skills to create their own self-portraits, and in the second lesson, they have been learning all about what death masks are, different versions created in different cultures and then creating their own pen portraits of an Egyptian death mask, which combined skills from the previous lesson alongside new skills they have learnt from their second lesson.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou
Weekly Update-1/5/26
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, we have started writing our biography about Howard Carter’s life. So far, the children have written their introduction, a bit about his early life, his teenage years and when he made his famous 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun. The children have been really enjoying it and are always keen to learn even more about him.
In reading, we have continued reading the next two chapters of our class novel (The Cat Mummy) and have focused on understanding any tricky vocabulary as well as summarising skills. We have also been reading our new story time book called Astro Chimp by David Walliams, which is very funny and has constantly been making the children giggle.
In maths, we have been continuing our work on decimals. We have focused din on partitioning decimals, flexibly partitioning decimals, comparing and ordering decimals. The children have been working extremely hard throughout this challenging unit of work and it’s great to see how much they have progressed and how much more confident they are with decimals.
In science, over our first two lessons, we have been focusing on understanding what the different parts of plants are, what their functions are and we have also been dissecting plants to observe those specific parts separately.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou
Weekly Update-24/4/26
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, we have started a new unit of work for our writing. We are focusing biographies and the children have been learning all about what biographies are and what features they include. We have then turned our attention to the subject of our biography, which is Howard Carter, the famous archaeologist responsible for discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun. As Ancient Egypt is our topic for the summer term, Howard Carter is the perfect person to focus our biography on and the children have really enjoyed researching facts about him and increasing their own knowledge about the subject of the biographies which they will eventually write. The children have also been practising turning sentences from first person into third person and also creating captions based around images relating to key events in Howard Carter’s life.
In reading, we have started our new class novel, which is The Cat Mummy by Jacqueline Wilson. The children have already been making lots of predictions about what they think the story will be about based on the front cover and the title of the story and we have started to read the first two chapters of the book as well. The children then followed this up with some super retrieval and inference work based on those first two chapters.
In maths, we have been continuing our work on decimals. This has been challenging for some children, but I've been extremely impressed with how much effort the children have been putting in and how much their knowledge and confidence has increased throughout this unit of work. We have been focusing on hundredths as decimals, hundredths on a place value chart and dividing 1 and 2 digit numbers by 100.
The children also attended The Skipping School’s Skipping Festival this week where they competed against five other schools. The children took part in individual and group skipping events and they all tried their absolute best and represented the school extremely well. Many of the children earned themselves gold, silver and bronze awards for the skills that they took part in and collectively it was more than enough to win the tournament. We’re very proud of all the children’s efforts and they will now be competing against eight other schools in the Leeds City Final, which will take place in June.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou :)