Another great week in the Otters class. We have continued our unit on Brazil and looked closer at the country though studying maps. We studied Brazil’s neighbouring countries and its cities on Monday with Miss Stott and on Wednesday we compared two capital cities through maps: Brasilia and our very own London.

In French we continued describing clothing and in computing we created a soundtrack with Scratch. The Year 4s had their first swimming lesson of 2025 and the Year 5s are sounding super with their trumpets. The Year 5s are now doing some extra maths with Miss Hanslow alongside PE with Mr Ramp. 

We have also continued our work on long multiplication in maths, the practise has paid off and as a whole we are a lot more confident with this skill. We will keep practising in our early morning sessions and also our flashbacks before each lesson. We have also looked at rounding as a method to solve calculations. For example 32 x 99 we would round 99 to 100 and then subtract one set of 32 from the answer. Some children found this method straight forward. We have also looked at using factors to help with multiplication, for example 43 x 15, we could split into 2 calculations 43 x 5 and 43 x 3 because 3 x 5 equals 15. (they are factors of 15) Then add the answers together.  We are working on finding our preferred methods. 

In English, we have done some fantastic desriptive writing based around the birds and insects that evolved from the black hat. We have then moved onto planning and writing our own idea of what could happen when the black hat was put on by the little boy. Some children came up with the idea of being transported to a different world, or back in time, amongst lots of other great ideas.  We have then been writing these stories towards the end of the week, trying to include all of the techniques we have learnt over the past week. We have some brilliant description.

In SPAG we have been looking at varying our sentence openers and using relative clauses, which has been very useful for our story writing. 

Keep up the hard work Otters. 

Have a great weekend. 

The Otters Team

Homework- sentence openers sheet.