Endangered animals

This afternoon we prepared fact sheets on endangered animals in Britain. We did some research on the Internet and then in our topic groups. The six animals that are endangered were: horseshoe bat, otter, red squirrel, common dormouse and the hedgehog.

Bonjour

Today we chose our e-pals and planned our letters. We will write the letters out neatly and send them this week. we are including our e-mail address so they can reply to us by email.
In Numeracy we used the symbols <> to show which numbers were greater or less than.

Another goodbye

Last week Titi now it is time for Dolapo's last day. It is always sad when a classmate leaves especially when they are such a good blogger like Dolapo is. Dolapo we wish you good luck in your new house and your new school. Don't forget to keep in touch.

Millionnaires

We have now received over 1, 000,000 on the Northwood web site in the last eighteen months. We are getting thousands of hits every day and during the World Cup received over thousand its a day. Don't forget there are plenty of games for you to learn and play.

Chinese New Year

We had a visit today from some Chinese performers. Everybody was amazed at the Chinese man when he danced with a skipping rope. Each class then received a workshop on either dance or calligraphy. We did calligraphy which was great.

Bonjour

Wow! Today we received letters from some children from France. They are the same age as us, we will write back to them and give them our e-mail addresses. We will then e-mail them regularly. In the afternoon we celebrated Pancake day by, amazingly, having pancakes.

Welcome back and Goodbye

We haven't been writing everyday in our blog but Titi asked us to keep writing it so she could read about Year 4. Above is the photo we took of Titi on our last day.
We have been so busy in the last month taking part in our Myst adventure, appearing in the newspaper for our vdeoconference with China.
Please keep reading to find out what we have been up to and don't forget we would love you to comment on our blog.

Carry on 'carrying over'

We were able to use today the 'carrying over' method of addition. Mr Greenwood and Karen said that this was the way that they were told when they were at school. Many of us found it easy as this was the way that our parents do addition sums.
In Literacy we marked our last Myst story. We looked through our work and made a note of adjectives and powerful verbs that we had used.
In science each group was given three containers of water: one containing hot water; one iced; and the other straight from the tap. We had to predict what temperature they would be in an hours time.

Tai Chi

In Numeracy we were given sums with five different numbers. We used the cummative law so that we could change the order that we added the numbers. We first of all checked to see if there were number bonds that we could add first.
We looked at some stories done by other children for the Myst adventure. "Above a vast barren desert ....
We discussed and researched the difference between the Old and New Testament and Temi, Thomas and Dolapo kindly brought their Bibles in to show.
Also in the afternoon we performed, by videoconferencing, our Tai Chi to teachers at an education show. Mrs Dean, who has visited the class many times, took part and copied our moves.

Smile please

We carried on our Myst adventure and used adjectives and powerful verbs in our writing. In Numeracy we looked at numbers such as 6, 7 and 13 and had to make four sums using just these numbers (two addition and two subtraction).
In the afternoon we had a visit from a photogrpaher who spent hours taking different photographs. These are to be used to tell other schools about all the videoconferencing that we do.

Making a thermometer

In our Myst adventure we spent time trying to find clues but children used this frustration well in their writing and described their feelings well.
We spent the afternoon making, or trying to, make thermometers. Some groups were very successful but some could not make it work but demonstrated good scientific understanding of the ideas involved.

TV stars

We watched today our TV programme that will be shown on TV next week. It was great because they managed to include all of the children in the film. It was funny to watch ourselves in a TV programme. The programme will be shown on Teachers TV three times next week.
We carried on with our Myst adventure and managed to enter the next dimension. We listened to other children's account of the story which were fantastic.
In Numeracy we did a lot of work on rounding and in Science we realised that descibing the temperature of objects as hot, cold, very hot, boiling etc is not very helpful and that we need to use a thermometer to measure temperture.

40 children in a classroom!

It was good to see so many smiles at nine o'clock. We wrote about our Christmas break and shared our stories with the class. There had been a leak in the roof and Year5's classroom was wet so they joined us for Literacy.
We used the game Myst Exile 3 to do some creative writing. The adventure was really exciting and the detailed images help us to describe what we saw.
In the afternoon we discussed our New Year Resolutions.

National Portrait Gallery visit

Today was our trip to the Gallery.

Gallery tomorrow

In numeracy we had to answer subtraction problems. Children chose the best way to answer the problems. Was it best to count on, use column subtraction or a number line?
In Literacy we edited our own work, it was difficult to find our own mistakes. We then looked at our tenses.
Tomorrow we are going to the National Portrait Gallery so we planned our trip, and considered good behaviour for trains and the gallery. We then thought about ways to ensure that we would be kept safe.

Happy Christmas from Australia

Read all about it

In the afternoon we went into our topic groups and started writing stories for the next edition of Northwood News. We will have articles about our China, portrait Gallery and Deal or no deal videoconferences.
we started our new topic in Literacy "Instruction". We noticed that many instructions start with imperative verbs (like orders). We placed instructions in order for making beans and toast and added diagrams to help with any tricky bits.

Merry Christmas from Taiwan and Russia

A great big thank you and Merry Christmas from our friends in Taiwan and Russia. The cards they sent were absolutely fantastic.
In Literacy we researched and wrote about Christmas traditions in England. This information will be sent and used in our videoconferences with our American schools.

Tudor writing

How easy is it to learn about the Tudors from writing from Tudor times? It was very difficult as the writing was hard to read and some of the wrds were unusual and spelt differently. Their were very few rules to spelling so people spelt words how they thought they should be spelt.
We then looked at Tudor letters and wrote rules that we would make if we were king.

Build a house

Thank you to everyone who brought in a cardboard box. We used these to start to make our Tudor houses. It was difficult but we followed the instructions carefully and they were very good. We will soon have our very own Tudor village or maybe town.

Portrait Detectives

We became portrait detectives in the afternoon trying to answer clues about Tudor portraits. This was difficult but there were some great answers. In Literacy we wrote information reports based on information from our National Portrait Gallery videoconference. Keenan produced a fantastic report using beautiful joined handwriting and was placed in the good book.