Beech Tree Class Blog 2023-2024
Beech Tree Blog
Weekly Update-9/6/23
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, in our maths work, we have been focusing on money, which has involved converting between pounds and pence, ordering money in ascending and descending order and comparing different amounts. The children have been working really hard, using different strategies with confidence and making rapid progress throughout the week.
In our writing, we are building up towards writing our own alternative story for Stone Age Boy. One of our lessons this week involved describing different characters from the Stone Age who appear in Stone Age Boy. The children were tasked with creating sentences that describe those characters using powerful expanded noun phrases, good conjunctions and to include a relative clause within their sentences. I have to say that the children did a fantastic job with their sentences and provided great description and some super relative clauses to add extra information. I really enjoyed reading those pieces of work :)
In science, our unit of work this half term will revolve around plants. Our first lesson focused on identifying the different parts of a plant and understanding what the role of each part is. The children then made their own mini leaflet which included their own drawing, with the different sections labelled and an explanation about the role of each part. The children produced some lovely and informative pieces of work and it was also great for the class to be able to look closely at the different parts of a plant in person (because they are all growing their own sunflowers) which helped to support their learning, although the sunflowers are not fully grown yet.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou :)
Weekly Update-26/5/23
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, the children published their setting description writing, which revolved around describing a cave and this links in with our current book, Stone Age Boy. They produced some super work which included a range of features such as personification, expanded noun phrases, fronted adverbials, similes and metaphors. When reading their pieces, I could definitely picture the cave in my mind based on their detailed description. Well done!
We have completed our class reader (Stone Age Boy) and the children did some fantastic inference work based on on how different characters feel at different points in the story and they have also created their own blurb and alternative front covers, which are designed to persuade other children to read Stone Age Boy.
In science, the children were helping a band find out which material is the most soundproof. They were using a decibel meter to record the noise made without any material around it and then they recorded the reduction in noise after placing different materials around the source of the noise. The results were very interesting and we had a nice discussion as to why that was the case.
In PSHE, we have just finished our topic for this half term, which was all about Being My Best. To finish off the topic, the children made posters all about themselves and all the different things required to help them be at their best e.g. a good amount of sleep, healthy eating and lots of exercise.
In DT, as part of our Edible Garden topic, the children created their own strawberry smoothies this week, They worked very in their groups, communicating well and sharing the jobs between each other.
I hope you all have a lovely week off and make sure to stay safe.
Mr Kyriacou :)
Weekly Update-19/5/23
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
In maths, we have moved onto decimals now, focusing on converting tenths into decimals and dividing 1,2 and 3 digit numbers by 10 and 100 using place value charts to support the children. The children have also put their times table and division knowledge to good use when solving decimal related problems. Well done!
As part of of our topic work, we were focusing on Stonehenge this week, looking into when it was created, where it was created, how it was created and why it was created. The children really enjoyed the lesson and we had lots of really interesting discussions about the significance of Stonehenge. It was lovely that they already had some knowledge about it because they have been reading about it in the fantastic topic books that the library have provided us with.
In music, we have continued to practise and develop our skills with the recorder. This week we were focusing on playing a tune that required multiple notes (B, A and G) to be used throughout the song. At first, the children found this challenging switching across 3 notes, however, I was extremely impressed to see how resilient they were and how quickly the children started to improve and become more confident with lots of practise.
In DT, our topic this term is Edible Gardens. This week our focus was on strawberries - understanding how strawberries grow, what time of year they grow, what they require to grow, creating detailed sketches of the outside and inside of a strawberry and labelling the different parts of their sketches. The children also did a smell and taste test and we discussed lots of different words that could be used to describe the smell and taste of strawberries.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou :)