Hello,

We hope that you have all had a good week and that you are enjoying the weekend so far.

This week, St. Peters welcomed the children back to school for the beginning of the second spring term. In English, the children have been exploring Rainforest poetry. On Monday, the children were given a ‘mysterious bag of words’ from which to make predictions about the genre, purpose and audience of their next writing outcome: a night time Rainforest poem! As the week progressed, the children were given adjective and verb cards and took part in a ‘shades of meaning’ activity in order to develop their vocabulary banks and to discuss/compare the intensity of particular word choices. The children particularly enjoyed justifying their own choices when deciding how to order their language cards. At the end of the week, Year Three worked in table groups to order the sentences from a WAGOLL poem (What A Good One Looks Like) in order to make a cohesive poetic verse. We were impressed by the children’s annotations of poetic language including alliteration and similes, as well as their explanations for the effect these poetic devices have upon a reader or audience. Well done Year Three!

In Maths, we have been learning about measurements. At the start of the week, we introduced this unit by showing the children a riddle: “You are as wide as you are tall”. The children had a fantastic time taking part in a variety of investigative activities, to explore mm, cm and metres to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Furthermore, Year Three were then able to create their own tests such as ‘Your hand span is half the length between your elbow and fingers’, etc. In particular, the children have used bar models, their knowledge of fractions (e.g. half of a metre is 50cm, 1/10 of a cm is 1mm) as well as measuring equipment when solving a variety of measurement problems. As the week progressed, children were also given challenges including open-ended combination problems and the opportunity to measure with a ‘broken ruler’ to start counting out lengths from a number other than zero. We were delighted to see the children’s use of collaboration and commitment across these tasks.

We hope that you all enjoy the rest of your weekend and look forward to seeing you all at parents evening next week.

Kind regards,

Miss Honeywell, Mrs Stewart and Mrs Sumba