Hot Seats, Get Your Hot Seats!

On Tuesday in literacy we used a technique called hot seating to learn more about a character in our class text, 'The Mousehole Cat'.

We looked at the character Tom and what we knew about him such as that he was a fisherman, had a cat called Mowzer and he lived alone as sadly his wife had passed away and his children had grown up. We then worked in groups to come up with some questions that we would ask Tom to find out more about him. Finally, we each had a 'Tom' on our group and then we asked them our questions.

Here are some pictures and videos of our hot seating activity:

Attendance

The attendance score for this past week is...

93.5%

This is below target. Let's have a big push and make these last few weeks really count!

Singing Days

Yesterday 3ST took part in the Hull Singing Days at the City Hall. We worked hard to learn the songs and felt very proud of ourselves performing them in front of an audience.

Here are some pictures from our day:

Learning Log

As we are flying towards the end of term there are lots of things to fit in and finish as the weeks go by. This week has been Healthy Eating Week and the children have enjoyed learning more about healthy eating, creating their own healthy lunches and working with Year 6 to create a healthy snack which was sold at the end of the day!

In literacy this week we have been heading towards the end of our book, Oliver and the Seawigs. We explored personification and metaphor to create our own pieces of poetry describing the sea or a beach scene. We came up with some incredible sentences and really understood how to use personification. We also decided to write a letter as Stacey De Lacey to apologise for his actions. We had to get into character and think about what he might say and how he might say it in a letter.

Our maths focus for this week has been on weight. We have already looked at scales and how to read different integers accurately so this week has focused on using this knowledge to solve different problems related to weight. We had to think carefully about what the questions were asking us to do in order to solve them correctly.

Reading:
There has been some fantastic readers this past week with a number of children reading 5 or more times and they have received their raffle ticket. However, there are still some children not bringing book bags in or not reading at all, along with children who are only reading once. Remember that children can also log a book they are reading at home as long as their school book has been read as well. Let's try really hard for the end of this term.

Enjoy your weekend!

Sea Monkey Music

Today in literacy we read about the Sea Monkeys making funny noises and banging on drums to chant and cheer on the bad island.

Attendance

The attendance percentage for the week before half term was...

95.4%

This is slightly below target but I'm sure we'll be able to reach that this week!

Learning Log

The first half of the summer term has come to an end! We have covered so much this half term and everyone has worked incredibly hard.

In literacy this week we have continued with our story and met some new and interesting characters. We were introduced to a mysterious new island that crept up on our main characters. We spent a couple of days working to create a poem about this new island using some fantastic vocabulary. We drew illustrations of the island from the description in the book (there's a blog post on that), we then used these to help us create a fantastic sentence to describe. After that we spent some time perfecting and improving our sentence before we shared them with the class to begin to create a poem. We could then create our own poem! They were amazing! We were also introduced to sea monkeys! We created leaflets on how to care for a sea monkey and came up with some brilliant ideas on how to do that! We have finished the week off by forming an argument giving reasons why Cliff (our island friend) should either grow roots and become a settled island or go to the Shallowed Hallows and enter the competition! What will he choose to do?

Maths this week has been using our knowledge of lines (horizontal, vertical, parallel and perpendicular) to explore and find different lines within 2D shapes. We worked in pairs to investigate 2D shapes and begin to identify the lines within them. After that, we used this understanding to work on our own and answer questions about lines within different 2D shapes - we found this very challenging but didn't give up! Towards the end of the week we have been measuring lines in shapes and comparing them before drawing our own lines and shapes accurately.

Reading:

Again we have seen an improvement with most people's reading this week. We have three girls who are leading the way. The expected number of reads for this half term is 35 (reading 5 times a week for 7 weeks). Unfortunately, there was a large number of children who had read less than 10 times throughout the whole half term! As this is classed as homework these children are not following school homework expectations and are falling behind in their reading as they are not progressing through the home reading levels as expected.
There are 7 weeks remaining after the half term break. It would be great to see every child reading at least 5 times a week every week. Let's see who is going to rise to the challenge and be the best improved!

Enjoy the half term break, fingers crossed for sunshine!

See you in June!

Illustrators

Today in literacy we focused on a section of text that was very descriptive about another rambling isle.

"It was tall and rocky, and on its summit dark trees clustered. Among the trees stood a ruined temple, crumbly and overgrown. Around the temple towered huge stone heads with empty eyes and open mouths. They looked a bit like the famous statues on Easter Island. (In fact they were where the Easter islanders had got the ideas from, for this Rambling Isle had passed close to Easter Island, long ago.)"

After listening to the paragraph carefully a couple of times we began to draw the image that the description put in our heads. We then spent some time sharing what we had drawn with our partner, annotating sections.

Attendance

The percentage of attendance for last week was:

95.1%

That is just below the target of 96% but we have already had a great start to this week with everyone in and on time. Well done!

Learning Log

We have had an exciting and jam packed week this week. Dressing up in our fancy wedding clothes on Thursday was a great treat and we all looked fantastic.

In literacy this week we have been continuing our story 'Oliver and the Seawigs'. We were introduced to a new character... a mermaid called Iris! We discussed what we knew about her from the story and created a character profile for her. We then learned about idioms, like "piece of cake", and used them to write about Iris. Also this week we learned what a seawig is. We designed a seawig ready to be made in the afternoon - there are photos of this on the blog for you to see. We also created sarcastic scripts and used our knowledge of dictionaries to create our own dictionary approved explanation.

Our maths focus for this week have been on shape. We started by recapping on 2D shapes and remembering the different properties for these. We then moved on to 3D shapes and began to look at some shapes that haven't been looked at before such as a tetrahedron. We focused on the different 2D shapes that make up the faces of a 3D shape. We then used this knowledge to create nets of a real life 3D shape.

Reading:
We have had a huge improvement on reading this week with lots of children reading five times or more. All these children have got their raffle ticket for this week. At the moment the girls are well in the lead and seemed to consistently reading at least five times or more. Let's see if the boys can catch up with the girls next week. Lots of children have moved up a level so it would be great for those children to be moving their way through their new reading level.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Creating a Seawig

Today we started creating our very own seawigs! We took the inspiration from our current class text called 'Oliver and the Seawigs'. Not sure what a seawig is? We are now very knowledgeable to feel free to ask us.

Here are some picture of us beginning to make our own seawigs:

Attendance

The attendance percentage for last week was...

95.1%

This is just below target. Can we get everyone in this week and get back up to target and above for next week?

Learning Log

It might have been a short week this week, but that didn't stop us from fitting in lots of exciting things as we started our new topic. We had a fantastic launch day on Tuesday - click here to follow the link to see the photos.

In literacy this week we started by making predictions about the new book that we are looking at. We looked at an illustration of some of the characters and came to come conclusions about what type of characters we think they might be and what the story might be about. We then read the first few pages and discovered they are explorers.

In maths this week we have been looking at positional language with lines. Words like vertical, horizontal, diagonal and parallel. We have been completing different tasks proving that we know what these words mean and can display them correctly.

Reading:
We had a big increase of children reading at least five times this week which was fantastic. Quite a number of children have been moved up to the next reading level, they will not be able to change their books up a level if they don't bring their books in on Tuesday. Let's have everyone bringing their books in on Tuesday ready to change and see who has read the most for this week!

Attendance

The attendance percentage for last week was...

89.3%

This is a huge drop from last week and below target.

Learning Log

With only one week left until our Celebration Event we have been working hard to make sure all our work is ready for display. A letter has been sent via email about the Celebration Event, if you have not received it please contact your class teacher or the school office.

In literacy this week, following from our planning of a graphic novel, we have begun making our own. We took time to plan out each page so that we knew what our illustrations were going to look like to help us when it came to making the final product. Once we had a good plan in place we were given our blank books and have been creating them using our story and own illustrations!

Our maths focus for this week has been on identifying and understanding equivalent fractions. We have used fraction walls to help us begin to see that some fractions might have a different numerator and denominator but the size of the fraction doesn't change. We are so proud of ourselves for sticking with this and beginning to understand more about fractions.

Reading:

There has been some improvement with the reading this week, although there are still some children who haven't read at all and haven't brought their books back in to get changed. We have been talking about the importance of reading as we were writing our own stories, as the more we read the better our writing will be as we will gain a wider understanding of creating an interesting text to read. Well done for those children who are now regularly reading at least five times! Keep up the good work!

Books Makers

This week in literacy we have been turning our stories into graphic novels.

We made a plan for each page and the illustration that we wanted to include on that page. Here is a sneak preview of what we have been creating.

Attendance

The percentage score for last week was...

97.9%

This is a huge improvement! Also, it is above the target of 96% so we are doing really well. Let's keep it up and try and aim for higher!

Learning Log

We have had a great week in 3ST this week and have loved the warmer weather.

In literacy we finished the graphic novel 'Arthur and the Golden Rope' and discussed our favourite parts. We then wrote a letter to the author, Joe Todd-Stanton, to see if he could answer any of our questions and we tweeted him a link to our letters. We have been thrilled to get a tweet back saying that he would reply! We then decided that we would used this graphic novel to begin to create our own adventure stories to turn into graphic novels! We have come up with some amazing ideas and are looking forward to getting started on the finished product.

In maths this week we have been looking at comparing and ordering fractions. We used chocolate to help us understand that the larger the denominator the smaller the fraction (click here to see our blog post on that) and the we began comparing them using the <, > and = symbols. Towards the end of the week we started looking at equivalent fractions. We used the fraction wall to help us begin to understand this.

Reading:

There has been a big improvement in reading so far this term and we are really trying to be the best each week - well done! I have reminded the children that even if they are amazing readers they still need to be reading with an adult at home as this helps to improve their fluency with harder texts, gain a better vocabulary and have a wider understanding of text structure. All of this helps them with their writing skills as well.

Have a wonderful weekend, let's hope for more sun!

Question Time

Today we finished the story Arthur and the Golden Rope. We were amazed by the ending and loved discussing our favourite parts of the book along with the techniques we liked that the author Joe Todd-Stanton used.

However, we still had questions that needed answers. We decided to write a letter to Mr Todd-Stanton and see if we could get a reply from him on Twitter.

Here are some of our letters:

Comparing Chocolate Fractions

We had a mouth watering maths lesson today... with chocolate!

We worked in groups with a chocolate bar.

First, we wrote down the fraction of the chocolate that we wanted that would give us the most, without having the whole. We chose lots of different fractions: 1/2, 1/15, 1/12, 1/4 and 1/10.

We then had to split the chocolate up into 1/2, 1/4, 1/6 and 1/12 and find out which would give the most amount of chocolate.