We have had another super week in Puffins class!

In Maths, the Year 4’s have been learning about multiplying and dividing by 10 and 100, recognising patterns and using prior times table knowledge to find related number facts! This will help build the foundations needed to move onto understanding decimal numbers in a few units time.

The Year 5s have continued their work on long multiplication in maths, the practise has paid off and as a whole they are a lot more confident with this skill. They will keep practising in our early morning sessions and also our flashbacks before each lesson. They 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. They 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, the children have written some beautiful descriptive pieces of writing about the birds, bugs and insects that emerge from ‘The Black Hat’. They then had the opportunity to create their own ending to the story. Some children imagined being transported to a different world, some imagined that something new had emerged from the hat. They had to consider what the problem would be in their story and how it would be solved. The children included loads of the descriptive techniques that we have learnt over the past couple of weeks.

In Geography this week, we took the opportunity to compare London and the capital city of Brazil, Brasilia. The children looked carefully at maps of both cities and compared both physical and human features, for example, universities, water sources and landmarks. We looked at both cities on Google Earth and agreed that they aren’t hugely dissimilar!

In Art, we have been learning about self-portraits. This week, we learnt about Punjabi mixed-media artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman. We researched her work and we created a page in our sketch books dedicated to her. We learnt that she created two self-portraits, both made from smaller images of herself, one of which took her 12 years to create! Over the next few weeks, we are going to explore different ways of creating our own self-portraits.