Welcome back Foxes! What a wonderful first week back we have had!

This half term our History topic is ‘The Ancient Maya’. On Thursday we had the wonderful opportunity to spend the day with Dr Diane, the only Maya archaeologist in the UK, who travelled all the way from Wales to be with us for the day.  She started the day by giving us an incredibly interesting presentation on her time on Maya archaeological digs, sharing with us some of the things that she has found, as well as some of the wonderful, and sometimes terrifying, animals that she has encountered in the Guatemalan jungle.

We then all got the opportunity to look at some incredible replicas of Maya artefacts, that she, and other archaeologists that she has worked with, have discovered. The children thought about what the pieces were made from, what they were used for and who they were created for or owned by.  Please ask your children to share some of the wonderful myths that she busted for us, as well as some of the wonderful facts and experiences that she shared with us.  If you would like to look at her website, which has a wonderful number of activities and information about the Maya follow this link: https://www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/

In History, we thought about what we wanted to know about the Maya people and how they lived.  We also created a timeline of important times in history for both the Maya people and other historical periods that we have previously looked at.

Continuing our Ancient Maya topic, in English this week, we started looking at a book called “The Rain Player” by David Wisniewski, a book which details the battle between a skilled pok-ta-pok player and the God of Rain. We looked at the cover of the book and thought about what it told us about the setting, as well as how we would use our descriptive techniques to create a passage about the stories setting.  We finished off the week by thinking about how, the priest, Ah-Kin-Mai may have felt knowing that his village was going to struggle because of Lord Sun and his terrible heat.

In Maths this week Year 4 have been looking at place value in connection with understanding thousands.  They have used number lines to help understand thousands, they have also partitioned them and started understanding numbers up to 10,000. 

Year 5 have been working on understanding numbers up to 1, 000, 000. They have done this in stages throughout the week and have thought about partitioning, place value charts and reasoning and problem solving.

I have high hopes for this year Foxes, thank you for returning after the summer holidays with such confidence! I look forward to seeing what you are going to achieve this year!

Miss Hanslow