St Michael's Primary School And Nursery
🌳Welcome To Elm's Class Webpage🌳
On our page we will be sharing our learning experiences and providing key information to parents.
Our Class Teacher is Miss Williams.
Our Class HLTA is Mrs Bowes.
Our Learning Support Assistants are Mrs Bello and Mrs Froude.
Elm's Expectations
In Elm we are expected to complete the following challenges each week:
📚Reading -
Read independently or with an adult 5 times during the week (Friday - Friday).
🔢Maths
- Complete 10 minutes daily on TTRS to develop our fluency and application of the times tables.
- Complete weekly tasks on Mathletics.
✏️Spellings
- Practise and complete a spelling test (Friday) based on the Year 4 spelling list.
Important links:
Spring Term 2024
Autumn 2023
Wow what a busy first term this has been in Elm Class. The children have worked so hard all term and produced some amazing work across all subjects. Please read below for an indepth description of some of the work covered in both Maths, English and our exciting Autumn Term topic of 'Chocolate'.
Maths
Our first unit of work was Place Value where we consolidated the childrens understanding from Year 3 where they learnt how to represent numbers upto 1000. This 3 week unit taught the children how to estimate, round and partition numbers upto 10,000.
We also had lots of fun in the place value unit of work reading and decoding Roman numerals.
Our second unit of work after half term was learning the formal methods of column addition and subtraction. We then applied these skills to lots of problem solving and reasoning questions.
Our third unit of work was measurement and particularly learning how to find the area of rectilineal based shapes. Finally we have reviewed multiplication and division by focusing on our existing times tables knowledge and learning the relationship between the two operations and completing inverse operations to solve multiplication and division calculations.
The children have also made great strides in their times tables knowledge with coverage of 3's,4's,6's and 7's.
English
The Wild Girl
The children spent the first half term looking at 'The Wild Girl' by Christopher Wormell. This excellent picture book is about a young girl living alone in the woods with her small brown dog. All is well until one cold winter's day a bear decides to visit their warm, safe cave.
Using this text as our theme we built towards the children creating their own wild story. They developed their own characters, animals and plots which helped them with the aid of text mapping skills to produce their own excellent stories.
Rotten Red Riding Hood
After half term we looked at 'Rotten Red Riding Hood' by Trisha Speed Shaskan. The theme of this block of work was to look at traditional tales with a twist.
In Rotten Red Riding Hood we get the Big Bad Wolfs side of the story and discover that Little Red is not particularly a nice person and the wolf is a vegetarian.
The children had a great time developing their own tales with a twist by using traditional story mountain development, writing newspaper reports and also persuasive letters from an angry Wolf to his local supermarket for failing to deliver his food on time.
We also again practised our text mapping skills and learnt the story off by heart.
Talk for Reading
In Year 4 we looked at Voices In The Park by Anthony Browne as our text. This thought provoking book is about a visit to a park told through the voices of two very different adults and children. With themes of class, society, friendship and prejudice it proved to be a very challenging text which helped develop the childrens understanding of how to deeply read a text and use evidence to prove your thoughts.
Chocolate
What an incredible time we have had with our Autumn Term Topic of chocolate. From understanding the origins of chocolate with the Ancient Mayans to exploring Central America in Geography and making some truly disgusting science experiments in Science.
In Science we began the first half term exploring Solids, Liquids and Gases using chocolate as our theme throughout by exploring reversible and irreversible changes and then exploring the water cycle. After half term we have looked at Animals including humans to look at teeth, digestion and the part played by all animals in food chains. We of course had to eat lots of chocolate throughout purely for scientific reasons.
In History we explored the ancient Mayans that existed from 250 AD all the way upto 1697. Incredibly they survived due to their isolated location in Central America being hid from the rest of the world by Jungles. Thankfully the Mayans helped develop chocolate which we can be eternally grateful for.
In Geography we looked at the birth place of the Mayan which is now South Eastern Mexico. We compared the land use with Colchester and how the land was essential for the survival of the Mayans. We also compared the Mayans with the Anglo Saxons and found some startling similarities and obvious differences.
Art was based around chocolate and the children learnt various shading and sketching methods to draft pictures of chocolate. They also developed their own idea for a chocolate bar and created a brand and wrapper for the bar.
Music was looking at Samba and percussion with the children learning how to build layers of offbeat percussive sounds to create their own Samba beat.
The children all found the unit of work both fascinating and delicious.
Pupil Perception Survey Link
