A new year and a new topic... History

Welcome back! I hope you all had a very restful and happy Christmas with those who matter most. The class have come back to school with excellent enthusiasm for learning this week and a sparkling attitude! Excellent work Spectacular Space Cadets!

This week we have started to look at the final of our four operations, division. The class worked practically to explore the concept of division through use of sharing with place value counters. This enabled them to  understand terms such as dividend and divisor and how these were involved in the division process. Once the class felt more confident with this, we looked more closely at the formal written method for division. The class picked this up quickly and felt confident around tackling fluency based problems. Next week, we will be looking at how we can start to reason and problem solve involving division. 

Elsewhere, in Literacy we have started a new unit on News. The class investigated a newspaper article about a hoard of Anglo Saxon coins which had been discovered and were challenged with retelling this in a news broadcast. We looked at similarities and differences between the two forms of media. This enabled us to establish a success criteria for writing, before we began to plan our own structure. Next week, the class will work to create their own broadcast script before videoing, editing and publishing their work to the whole school in an assembly. I am so very excited to see the end product!

In our topic sessions, we have now moved towards a history based focus. Our theme this half term is the Anglo Saxons. To kick start our learning, yesterday the class completed an archaeological dig linked to Sutton Hoo,  where they found various artefacts and had to infer what they could be, who they were for and why they were used. The class' verbal reasoning was fantastic, with well thought-through, refined answers.  Next session they will use secondary sources of evidence to support in researching exactly what their primary evidence is and the story that it tells. Check back next week for further updates!