What a super first week back we have had! The children have settled back into our school routine nicely and are ready and raring to start a new half term of learning!

This week has been incredibly exciting as we have started our brand-new topic: Beautiful Brazil! The children have enjoyed learning about where in the world Brazil is, which continent it is in and which ocean it borders. They have learned which other countries are close to Brazil and which cities it is home to.

In Maths this week, the year 4s have been learning all about factors. We found out that a factor x factor = product. We learnt how we can use factors to help us solve large multiplications. At the end of the week, we started thinking about multiplying by 10, this will solidify our understanding of place value and give us a foundation for when we start to learn about decimal numbers.

In year 5, the children have been learning a new method of long multiplication. We have been working on multiplying 2-digit numbers by 2-digit numbers (e.g. 23 x 18). We have been practising this and will continue to do so next week too, extending to 3-digit numbers by 2-digit numbers. If you want to practise some at home, that would be great as the children have found this quite a tricky concept!

In English, we have been doing lots of descriptive writing inspired by a video clip called 'The Black Hat'. The children have not seen the whole clip, so they are keen to find out what will happen next. We have done some great predicting too, the children have some fantastic ideas, which we will utilise even more next week!

In Computing we have started our coding unit, using scratch.mit.edu. The children enjoyed choosing instrument avatars and creating their own band using sound clips.