Hello,
We hope that you have all had a good week so far.
On Wednesday, we were fortunate enough to have a very special guest speaker visit our school. Mr. Chris Lubbe, who had been a personal body guard for Nelson Mandela, came to St. Peter’s to speak to Years 4-6 about the Apartheid, Racism and Mutual Respect. He shared many stories about his inspirational journey and described how it felt to live in a segregated community. Chris informed us that he had promised Mandela to continue his work, by visiting schools, colleges and universities to educate young people about equality and the need to respect one another regardless of any differences we may have. After the assembly, there was a 20 minute Q&A session which enabled the children to ask Chris any particular questions they wished to raise, following the morning assembly. Please see the photos below…
In English, the children have been learning about speech dialogue and how this may be used to develop the plot line of a story. In particular, we selected two pivotal moments from our ‘Jemmy Button’ story – we then used role-play and dialogue to pretend to be the characters from the story and generate our own conversation that we felt would have taken place. As the week progressed, we then revisited our learning on speech punctuation, using our special speech rhyme and actions to help us remember the key rules when recording direct speech. For an additional challenge, the children then had a go at switching the order of their sentences (detail first, then dialogue, e.g. Jemmy whispered quietly, “Are you sure?”) and even successfully managed to include additional narrative detail between dialogue entries, to show what each character was thinking to themselves as the conversation developed. Well done Year Four!
In Maths, we have continued to learn about time. Specifically, we have focused upon telling the time to the nearest 5 minute and 1 minute intervals, before then moving on to conversion problems about time. During these sessions, both classes discussed the ‘scale’ around a clock and then identified how the numbers around a clock face were similar to a number line with equal jumps. By the end of our learning this unit, we looked at digital time and used interactive resources to help us compare and convert between analogue, digital and 24 hour time. We were very impressed by the commitment that had been demonstrated by each class, when partaking in a variety of tricky Maths challenge problems across the week.
We look forward to seeing you all next week.
Kind regards,
Miss Honeywell, Miss Jackson-Nash and Mrs Cairns.