Polar Bears

Well done Polar Bears! You made it through our week of testing, we hope the slippers and pillows helped you feel more relaxed, making a hard week a little easier. We are very proud of the resilient and reflective approach that you took. This week has seen us travel to Alchemy Island, we explored portals around the school that could transport us and learnt what an alchemist is.  We worked collaboratively to design the alchemist's lab.  Then we explored some unknown samples left by the chief alchemist which we named and the explored the properties of. In Maths we have continued to work with fractions and are currently focusing on subtracting fractions.  We have started to explore our unnamed book in English, we will reveal the name at the end of the half term!

As mathematicians, we have completed our work on adding fractions - finishing with adding mixed numbers. We have been very resilient with using the bar model to this and look forward to tackling subtraction after half term. In English, we taken inspiration from 'There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom' to plan, write and edit our own contemporary short story. We have worked hard to include relative clauses, modal verbs and adverbials in our writing. In Topic this week, we have concluded our work on our stop motion projects. We have demonstrated such creativity and independence when working on these and got great feedback from our peers. We also conducted an investigation into which material is the best insulator for heat. We were very safety-conscious and enjoyed discussing how insulating materials are important for astronauts. As we are half way through the year, it is time for us to complete our mid-year assessments to monitor the progress we have made

What a wonderful week of learning we have had! As mathematicans, we have been using bar models to help us compare, order and add fractions with different denominators. The children have been very resilient, aspirational and reflective with this and are beginning to master the tricky sums! In English, we focused on the thoughts and feelings of the main characters as our book concluded. We acted out some key scenes and we excelled at showing our characters' emotions through our body language and facial expressions. We also created story maps for our class text, 'There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom', to help us plan our own stories next week. In the afternoons, we have been continuing to create our stop motion projects and practising for our 'Stargazers' assembly. We hope you enjoyed it!

Polar Bears have been working incredibly hard in all areas of their learning this week. As a class, we adore our new class text and it has been amazing to watch the children really explore and question the characters within the book. They have written amazing diary entries and have really grasped the thoughts and feelings of Bradley, the main character. In Maths, the children were pretty anxious to be starting a new unit on fractions as they can seem a little daunting sometimes. However, they have made an excellent start! They have explored equivalent fractions, converted between improper fractions and mixed numbers, manipulated fraction sequences and used bar models to compare fractions with different denominators. Polar Bears were aspirational, resilient and collaborative during these tasks which has helped them to become fraction masters - well done! In Topic, we have begun work on our stop motion video projects. The children have been very creative during these sessions - watch