Spring Term 2025
Week commencing 3rd February 2025
Wow! Our independent writing week has been incredibly hard work but, goodness me, the results are astounding! The children have written beautiful reports of our visit to the park including headings, subheadings, interesting facts and recommendations. I am currently in the process of looking for a suitable spot within the school so that the children can showcase their beautiful pieces to the entire school. All of the children are making good progress with their writing and I am so incredibly proud of them! Next week, due to the Paris trip, we will be focussing on some of our individual English targets, such as using the suffix -ed for past tense, spelling common exception words and using capital letters and full stops independently. We will begin our new story and writing sequence after the half term.
In maths the children have worked incredibly hard too. Some of the children have been learning to multiply a two digit number by a one digit number where an exchange is involved. This has been tricky and we have used lots of resources and manipulatives to support their understanding. It took us a few days, but we got there together and all of the children were feeling successful by the end of our learning. Next week, we will move on to division. Some of the children have been learning about shape. After being introduced to the names and properties of cylinders, cubes, cuboids, spheres and cones, the children then spent time identifying and sorting them by their properties. They then matched real life objects, such as cans and cereal boxes, to the shape names that they have learned. They are doing incredibly well with this learning! Next week they will move on to 2D shapes.
Week commencing 27th January 2025
What a busy week we have enjoyed together! In English this week we planned our independent reports based on a visit to the Boston road recreation ground. We identified the key features of the text that we would need to use and arranged these on a planning sheet. We then took these with us on our visit to the park to enable us to complete our plans, including all of the wonderful information we had gathered. We spent the remainder of the week writing our report and will continue to do this next week. We are being extremely careful authors, checking our work as we are writing and making improvements as we go. I am very excited to read the final pieces!
In maths this week, some of us have continued our multiplication and division learning. We have been multiplying by ten and then making links between multiplying by ones and tens. This was tricky, so we spent two lessons representing the numbers we were multiplying using equipment. This helped us to spot the patterns and make predictions about the solution to our number sentences. Next week, these children will move on to multiplication with and without exchanging tens. The second maths group continued their learning around numbers within 50. We are getting so good at using a number line and a hundred square to support our calculations! All of the children now understand the language of more and less and are becoming increasingly independent with finding one more and one less on a hundred square. Next week this group will progress onto length and measure, before both groups come together to study shape.
Well done Everest team. You have had an amazing week.
Week commencing 20th January 2025
This week we have been working hard in English to complete our sentence stacking lessons. We have written some interesting facts about the animals that we could see on a safari and used some beautiful language to describe them. I would love to travel to Africa to see a candy floss pink, elegant flamingo! We learned about imperative verbs this week and used them to tell our reader to “hop on a plane to Africa today!”. Next week we will begin our independent writing sequence, which will begin with a visit to Boston Road Recreation Ground on Tuesday. Please remember to bring a warm coat and some sensible shoes. We will be leaving immediately after morning registration so it is important that children arrive on time please.
As mathematicians this week we have been multiplying and dividing by 4 and 8. We spent some extra time on these lessons as we discovered how important it is to ensure our number sentences are in a logical order when we write division sentences else they just do not make sense! We spent an additional day on Friday, reviewing some of our learning and ensuring we were reading questions correctly so that we can answer them accurately. The children have become extremely proficient at using their multiplication grids to support them in this topic of learning, and we are becoming more secure in knowing what a fact family is and how this can help us to solve multiplication and division problems.
Week commencing 13th January 2025
This week we have begun to write sentences for our travel journal which is set on a Safari in Africa. We have written beautiful sentences that include similes to describe our first impressions – “The first thing I saw was the grass as green as an olive. The water was as blue as sapphires”. We then described the sunrise using adjectives to paint a beautiful image in the reader’s mind. We have completed some research around the animals that we would see in the Savannah, which will help us to write some interesting facts about the animals.
In maths we are continuing with our multiplication and division learning. We have been multiplying and dividing by 3 using lots of support to help us. We spent some time learning how to use a multiplication square to support us with our times table knowledge. We have also spent time looking at the fact families that are made with multiplication and division sentences, representing these using arrays and equipment to secure our understanding.
Week commencing 5th January 2025
Welcome back Everest class! We have had a lovely first week back together and have settled back into our routines nicely. We are beginning a new unit in English in which the children will be writing a travel journey report. We have spent the week learning about the different features of these texts such as headings, subheadings, date and location. We then spent time finding these features and discussing how they can help us to understand what we are reading and to signpost the information we need to find.
In maths we are continuing with our multiplication and division learning. We have spent time sharing and grouping amounts and finding multiples of 2, 5 and 10.
