This afternoon has been a very musical affair in Team CB! We have been busy getting to grips with our new music focus for the term, learning the Rock song I Wanna Play in a Band. The class were fantastic at demonstrating their listening and appraising skills as they listened to the music, commented on their like or dislike of the track, as well as what they could hear and what genre of music this was. Once we were familiar with the context of the music, the class warmed up playing a series of games to help them find the rhythm. They also spent time warming their vocal chords before spending time practicing keeping to the pulse and rhythm of the music. It was lovely to then practice the song, with children working incredibly hard to project their voice when singing and engage with relevant actions linked to the song. After learning the first two verses and the chorus, the class performed as a whole. I must say the piece sounded beautiful I can't wait to learn even more of the song!

Time is just flying by in Team CB and we are already at the end of Week 3. During the last fortnight, Team CB have been non-stop learning and engaging with all areas of the curriculum. The class have been very enthusiastic about all their new areas for learning and their motivation to learn has been lovely to see. 
In our Maths, we completed our learning around adding and subtracting 3 addends in Week 2. During this week, we have moved on to our Place Value unit. This will run for the remainder of Autumn as we seek to support the Team in having a really solid grounding of number. This week, we have been looking at 100. We have practically explored how many tens make 1o0 and how many ones. We have represented this in various ways including using dienes, tens frames, place value counters and 100 squares. Following on from this, we have also investigated how 100 is made up of 50s, 25s and 20s. 
In Literacy, we have continued to write our Roald Dahl biography. We have spent time recapping the use of subordinating conjunctions including when, if and because. We have also discussed pronouns as a way of avoiding repeating "Roald Dahl" throughout our work. Children have been working hard using their self-researched notes to write their biographies and this will make a fantastic display on our external windows. 
In Reading, we have been working as a class to read extracts of some of Roald Dahl's most famous texts including Matilda and George's Marvellous medicine. We have worked on embedding the new routine of Key Stage 2 whole class reading, where we focus on vocabulary, fluency and then comprehension skills across the week. Our recent focus has been on retrieval skills and highlighting key information within questions. We have used skimming and  scanning skills to locate information and ensure our answer is derived from the text. 
Be sure to check back soon for more updates!

As part of our weekly timetable, each class through has designated Incredible Me time where we develop upon our PHSE objectives and embed secure relationships. Over the last few weeks we have been busy understanding and following rules in team games such as outdoor obstacle courses. We have also developed team work skills and playing with others in parachute games and table football blowing pompoms with straws. We will continue to tackle the importance of rules and teamwork over the coming half term.

​This term we are exploring the Stone Age through to the Iron Age and as part of this we are creating our own sketches of Stonehenge. We have studied images of Stonehenge to support with our understanding of how it was constructed. This has helped us when thinking about how to sketch this.  After completing our sketches, we are now ready to use watercolours to paint these over the next coming weeks.
 
Our artist of the half term is Tony Marsh who is a sculptor and ceramicist. We are looking closely at his work this half term, as later in the half term we will be creating clay pots linked to the Stone Age.

As part of our Science, we have been hard at work looking at our new topic of plants. The class had some knowledge already of plants, but we have continued to build upon this. We begun by looking at how we know plants are living organisms, discussing their need for food and water and that they breathe and grow. From this, we looked more specifically at flowering plants. We then identified and sorted a range of plants based on whether they were flowering plants which produced seeds or fruits or not. Using real flowers, the class explored the features this plant had. We used key vocabulary such as stem, roots, leaves, flower to describe and label. From this we began to orally discuss what their function might be, an area that we will further explore next week. We concluded our learning by heading outdoors to compare the flowering plant to a tree and discussed the similar and differing features such as a trunk.

After a long weekend respecting the Queen's funeral, Team CB came back full force this week and  have shown fantastic historical understanding as we have worked on our new unit of the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. To help children understand this period of time, we began by using Chronozoom to help us understand how humans are only a small part of wider history. The children were amazed to see just how much history comes before human involvement. From this, we discussed our new area of focus. Children were encouraged to make educated predictions around the order of the three ages based on their existing knowledge.  The class were fantastic at reasoning that the Stone Age would come first because of this resource being easier to come by. They were then able to correctly reason that the Bronze Age and then Iron Age followed. After we were secure in knowing the three ages, we headed outdoors to create a human timeline showing the duration of these periods. The class were clear about the Stone Age being the longest duration and that within this was the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Eras. 

This week we have been busy working hard on our new PE focus for the half term. Our two units this half term are Games and Dance. 
In Games, we have been busy learning, to show confidence using our ball skills. This has involved controlling a rolled ball across our body, balancing using a ball and collecting the ball efficiently. 
In Dance, we have started our new unit which will ultimately see the class learn to apply air patterns, jumps and shapes into dance phrases. They will explore additional dance elements such as tempo, space and dynamic through movement.  We aim to build up to creating a group dance phrase based on the movements and sounds of fireworks.

As Team CB children have moved from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2 this year, their learning journey grows as they begin to learn a Modern Foreign Language. Our language of choice at Park Street is Spanish. 
The class have been so excited to learn Spanish but our session this week focussed on knowing more about Spain as a country and its culture. We discussed where Spanish was spoken in the world, cities and places within Spain and traditional Spanish cultures. The class were excited by the food that Spain has to offer and so we will revisit this at a later date when we learn Spanish for please and thank you as we will use this in context to try some traditional Spanish delicacies.

With a new year comes new and exciting computing challenges. In Team CB, our first unit of focus is Online Safety. It is so important that children are given chance to learn as much as they possibly can about staying safe online, from the earliest possible point. During this week's session, we have been learning about we can search online and the difference between searching a platform such as Purple Mash and the wider internet. Children were fantastic at discussing who they could inform if they saw or experienced something they did not like online. I am sure their knowledge will only continue to grow over the course of this unit. Next week, Team CB will be learning about how we can communicate online through the use of Emails.

What a truly incredible start we have had in Team CB! This week has been truly delightful, getting to know the class as student from Team JF and Team AC come together to form the new Team CB. What has been clear to see is that the class are going to be an incredibly hardworking bunch who are so eager to do their very best.

In true Park Street style, we have wasted no time in getting straight into learning. Our week has been jam-packed! In our Maths this week, we have been looking specifically at adding 3 addends together. We have used a variety of concrete and pictorial resources to support our understanding, and have been working really hard to use the correct mathematical language when reasoning. As we move into next week, we will continue to look at 3 addends, for both addition and subtraction through 10.

In our Literacy, we have been working hard on developing our understanding of our class Acclaimed Author. This year, in Team CB our author is Roald Dahl. In our writing, we have been looking at who Roald Dahl was and his important contributions to literature. We have developed upon what we already know, by researching more information about him and other elements of his life beyond Roald Dahl the writer. Did you know he used to be an RAF pilot?  We will be using the information we have gathered to develop a biography of his life which will be displayed in our classroom over the coming few weeks. 

In our reading, we have been busy working on our dictionary skills, we have recapped alphabetical order and how we can use this to help us locate words and their meanings in a dictionary. All of these words were of course from some of Roald Dahl's most famous books - frobscottle however was a word we could not find!

Over the coming weeks, we hope you continue to check back on the blog for snippets of what else we have been up to in our learning.