What we are doing this week in Lilac Class

WB: 20.9.21

In Maths this week in Lilac Class, we are consolidating our work on rounding numbers within 100,000 using our knowledge of multiples of 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000.  Lilac Class will then use a variety of pictorial representations, for example, place value charts and part-whole models to show numbers to One Million. 

For English this week, we are levelling up our writing about setting based on Aaron Becker’s ‘Quest’.  We are exploring what the children in the story see and what they might feel and hear when they discover the world that is behind the wooden door.  We will then move onto planning our next piece of extended writing that is a diary account.  We are imagining that we are the Conquistador Hernán Cortés who is writing a diary entry about his experience of trudging through the tropical rainforest of Mesoamerica with his men and then discovers some gigantic ancient ruins.  Our focus is to use the features of diary writing such as writing in the first person and in the past tense referring to emotions and feelings, writing events in chronological order and using fronted time adverbials. 

Our Whole Class Guided Reading text this term is ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ by C.S. Lewis.  We are reading Chapter Three and our main task is to become a ‘word detective’ exploring the meaning of unknown words, looking at the context of the sentence for clues. 

In RE this week, Father John will be coming in to talk to us about our Big Question ‘What does it mean if God is loving and holy?’.  He will be discussing in more depth what ‘Omnipotent’, ‘Omniscient’, ‘Eternal’, ‘Holy’ and ‘Loving’ mean and where we can find evidence of these words in the Bible. 

In Science this week, we are looking in more depth at our Solar System. We will be examining the distance between the planets and where they are in relation to the Sun.  We will also be learning about the sizes and what the atmosphere is like.  In ICT this week, we are starting our block of learning entitled ‘Coding’.  The children will be reviewing coding vocabulary and will use a design to create a program. In Topic, Lilac Class will perfect their role play.  As a drama activity we are imagining that we are a Spanish Conquistador explorer who has just discovered a ruined city deep in the Mesoamerican rainforest.  What do you feel about it and what do you want to learn about what you have discovered?  We will then be examining photographs of original Mayan artefacts found in the ancient ruins.  What were they used for and what do they tell us about how the Ancient Mayan civilisation lived their lives?  In Art, we are creating Mayan artwork based on original designs using the techniques of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.