Weekly News 3.10.25
Team Aqua and Team Topaz have had a great week; they have been completing some incredible learning and have really impressed us! Here is what we have been up to…
Maths
In maths this week, we have been learning to multiply. A key word that we learnt this week was the word ‘product’. In a multiplication calculation, the answer is called the product, so the product of 5 and 4 is 20. We began by multiplying by 10 or 100, and learnt that, although we know the sneaky way of just adding a 0 or two 0s, what we are actually doing is making the number 10 or 100 times bigger and the digits move 1 or 2 place value columns to the left. We practised this using some place value sliders.
We then moved on to learning how to multiply a 3 digit number by a 1 digit number using short multiplication e.g. 362 X 5 =. We also call this column multiplication as we write the calculation out in columns. See the picture below for an example. The children who have not quite learnt all of their times tables yet, used a multiplication square to help them with this.
Next week we will be learning to divide. The children will be using their known multiplication facts to work out missing numbers in division calculations e.g. 42 ÷ ? = 6.
English
In English this week we have continued reading ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes. The children are enjoying the story and it has given us some excellent prompts for writing character descriptions. We have been learning some more skills needed to write a good character description this week. We have learnt to use superlatives to describe characters, such as bravest, cleverest, most powerful, tallest, most courageous. We have also learnt that we should start sentences with fronted adverbials and try not to use boring sentence openers such as he, she, the or the character’s name. Some fronted adverbials that we used were; Without warning, Menacingly, Loudly, On the top of her head, In the blink of an eye, In her hand.
Next week, we will be finding out about real life robots and write an information text about them.
Thematic
In science this week, we have been learning more about hearing. We have learnt about noise pollution, about how we can protect our ears and about how people communicate who have hearing loss or are deaf. We made ear defenders and learnt that a material that slows sound down is called an insulator. We used paper and tissue paper as an insulator in our ear defenders. The children learnt about hearing aids and cochlea implants. Here we are wearing our home-made ear defenders. Some of us made a strap around our chin too to keep the ear cups tight on our ears!
