English

For anti-bullying week, class 4 have been working on some anti-bullying poetry. We have been inspired by spoken-word poets from around the world, listening closely to the ways in which they take their poems and perform them with passion, rhythm and emphasis.

Using the starter of “To this day….”, we generated ideas about how bullying might make a person feel. What would they think about looking back? How would it affect their lives? Using this, we constructed a poem with the ability to swap and change lines around to ensure we included rhythm and impact. We also made sure to finish our poems on a high note, celebrating the wonderful things that make us all special and unique.

Everyone has had an opportunity to perform their poem to an audience, but you might like to request a private performance of your own at home!

In English, we have been using the topic of “refugees” to guide our writing as we read “The Boy at the Back of the Class”.

As this is such an important and current topic, we have been writing a lot of persuasive pieces, encouraging people to change their minds about the issue. Even though this is a tough thing to do, it is an important life skill. It’s particularly tough when you need to argue against what you might actually believe in!

We capped our persuasive unit off with a big debate. We spent some time learning about the houses of parliament, and how debates are held and managed there. This allowed us to create our own mini-house of commons in our classroom, complete with Mace and speakers boxes! If you can believe it, there is even such a thing as a John Bercow soundboard, so Mr Dean took great delight in getting him to shout “order! order!” on demand. Everyone was referred to by their proper title of “the right honorable” and took turns to make their arguments.

Everyone should be very proud of how they conducted themselves throughout the debate. People listened carefully and respectfully to the arguments being made, and put forward some insightful counter-arguments which really helped to change minds. Well done all!

We have been using our knowledge of our solar system (linked to our Science topic) to plan, draft and write a non-chronological report on the Moon.

After looking at a range of non-fiction information texts from our library to identify the features and completing some thorough research on the topic for homework, we tried to sort some of examples of sentences so that we understand how to give our writing cohesion and make sense to the reader.

In groups, we began organising the information according to whether it would be appropriate for the introduction, one of the four main sections, the glossary or Did you Know?

This has helped us make sense of our research so that we can organise our writing into paragraphs under some suitable subheadings that we developed such as: ‘Physical Features’,  ‘Moon Exploration’, ‘Phases of the Moon’.