January 2022

Gloucester Class - January Blog

Hi everyone - welcome back to Gloucester Class’ blog!

English

In English, we have built on our informative writing skills by studying, innovating, and finally inventing our own informative reports. We began  by studying a report on coastal erosion, and analysing its structure, use of language, and register. Once we’d learnt enough from this example, we ‘pulled it apart’ to see how it is made up, and used this knowledge to plan and write our own reports on subjects of our choosing. Our pupils were able to really show off some of their interests and knowledge here, and we finished with some really impressive reports.

Currently, we are working through our ‘Stories from Other Cultures’ unit, taking as our model text the coming of age story of Toki, a young boy sent out from his tribe on a rite of passage with a twist. We are in the process of innovating sections of this text, drawing all the new sentence structures, writing techniques, and language features we can from it as we prepare to invent our own stories set in other cultures!

Maths

In maths, we have begun learning about statistics represented in tables and timetables. We have also introduced squared, cubed, and prime numbers into our learning, as well as beginning to round decimal numbers to particular decimal places. We have combined this with our previous learning on fractions and decimals to start understanding the links and connections between different topics.

Geography

In geography, we have learnt all about coastal erosion, bringing in our report writing skills and our own research projects as we learnt the causes and effects of coastal erosion.

Science

In Science, we have begun looking at forces and how these affect and dictate our lives. We began with an overview of forces, before scoping in to study gravity and air resistance in more detail. We have vivified our science lessons through the use different experimental methods, as well as our use of scientific (and not so scientific) equipment: to understand air-resistance, we tried running across the playground with different materials held out in front of us. We measured, recorded, and drew upon our results to reach scientific conclusions.

RE

In RE, we have been investigating the themes of freedom and justice through the story of Moses and the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. We have had some incredibly rich discussions about these big themes, and have developed our own notions of how freedom and justice should be realised in the world today. On Martin Luther King day, we were able to bring these ideas into our writings on big ideas.

Guided Reading

In guided reading we have started a new book! Who Let the Gods Out? by Maz Evans tells the story of Elliot as he accidentally finds himself embroiled in an adventure to save the world alongside a host of characters from classical mythology. We are continuing to build up our comprehension skills, our ability to empathise with characters, and our use of quotations as evidence for our opinions and inferences.