Last week, we had a wonderful time on our residential trip. We enjoyed lots of exciting activities and had a great time with all our friends. We were all very tired on the Thursday, but enjoyed making picture collages/scrapbook pages, documenting all the exciting things we got up to. It was also a great opportunity to use our ICT skills. 

On Friday, we came to school in our PJs to raise money for The Book Trust. We enjoyed a morning of reading, writing and drama activities, all centred around Harry Potter. We found out which Hogwarts house we would be in, and then created our own houses in small groups. We also enjoyed some shared writing, working in groups to write about Harry, Hermione and Ron adventuring into the Forbidden Forest. We had lots of fun and it was great to spend time with our friends from Year 5. 

This week, we have been extremely busy! We have started a new English unit, following a film clip called “The Present”. We have been learning lots of different features and techniques that we can use in our narrative writing, to make it more exciting for the reader. For example, describing a characters actions, body language and expressions to show the reader how a character is feeling, rather simply telling them. We have also been learning to open our sentences using fronted adverbials, to make our writing more exciting and to provide even more detail for the reader.

We have been working hard in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling this week. We have been learning how to use pronouns in our writing to aid cohesion and avoid repetition. We have also been learning rules for adding suffixes to the end of words. 

In Maths, we have moved onto money this week. We have enjoyed getting the resources out to support our learning and develop this very important life skill. We have enjoyed applying our learning to lots of real life contexts. It is great to see how lots of areas of Maths come into our everyday life. 

In Forest School this week, we have also celebrated “Bee Day”. We made bee hotels and learnt all about why bees are so important. 

This half term has whizzed by and we only have one more week until May half term! Keep up the hard work Chestnuts.