Summer 1 - Cliffhanger by Jaqueline Wilson

This week has had fun getting to grips with our new Adventure. We kick started the Adventure meeting the characters from our story 'Cliffhanger'.

This week we have been writing a letter to Mum and Dad from Tim. We have unpicked the features of a good letter and then included punctuated questions, paragraphs to organise and commas in a list.

We have been reading a short story by Macbeth called Horror Story. We read the story and highlighted the features in the text which made us 'think out loud' or become intrigued and want to find out more. We also looked at why the text was a good quality story highlighted those features too. 

We then thought about what we can infer from the text and what we know as fact 'literal'.

Wizard Words: Today we looked at our new Wizard words we thought about how these new words could be used in this week's character description. We unscrambled the words and read the definition of each. We then used these words in sentences as well as including fronted adverbial and expanded noun phrases.

This week we are writing a character description of Giles' from our story 'Cliffhanger' the children have looked at an example of a character description and picked out the main features. We then created a list of must haves and additional features which would make it even better and allow us to reach our writing targets.

This week we have listened to another chapter of our text 'cliffhanger' we've learnt a little more about the characters in the story. We thought about the physical features, personality traits and hobbies and interests of Giles. We organised our thoughts and then wrote our own character descriptions.

Animals, including humans unit!

We have looked at the different type of teeth in our jaw and created our own teeth using plasticine.

This week in our guided reading we have been reading a true story from a collection of stories named 'survivors' we have been using our reading skills to connect with the text and think about how our own experiences help us understand and empathise with the story.

In art this half term we have been looking at the work of Antony Gormley the sculptor. We looked at photographs of lots of his sculptures and discussed similarities between them. We then applied what we had learnt about sculptures and Antony Gormleys style to create our own clay models of 'Cliffhanger' characters. We then positioned these models in the style of Antony Gormleys 'field' sculpture. 

In our guided reading lessons this week we have been reading a poem called 'The River' by Valerie Bloom. The poet uses personification to describe the river as a male. We unpicked lots of features including similies, metaphors, repetition and rhythm. To help us we completed an activity linking feature to definition. We then highlighted the features we noticed in the poem.

In Science this week we have looked at the importance of looking after our teeth and carried out an experiment to find out if different liquids are bad for our teeth! We discussed which variables we would keep the same and which we would change. We submerged boiled eggs in the different liquids as egg shell is very similar to our teeth. We are going to observe them over time to find out what effect these liquids have on the enamel of our teeth.

We have looked at food chains and the different names for various roles in the food chain. We created our own food chains with a producer, primary consumer, secondary consumer and an apex predator.