Highmoor week commencing 9th March

Date: 13th Mar 2020 @ 1:27pm

Welcome to an incredibly busy week in Highmoor!

Our week started with a bit of line dancing at Sonning Common Primary School! It was great fun learning how to line dance to some of our favourite tunes! In the afternoon we visited the Explorer Dome in Henley. This was an immersive experience where we learned all about water, its different states, what happens to it in different environments, the water cycle, what water contains and much more. It was really exciting being enclosed within the dome and learning lots of interesting facts.

On Wednesday we had our trip to Wallingford to bring our topic of the Normans to a close. We started off in the museum where there were 3 activities for us to do. We saw artefacts from daily life during Norman times, reconstructed a model of the castle, labelled a castle and explored the museum. Then we walked to the remains of Wallingford castle. We were suprised to find that most of the stone buildings had gone, leaving behind huge ditches and embankments. We had to use our archaeological and historical skills to piece together what the the castle would have looked like 1000 years ago. 

In literacy we have been looking at the correct layout of a letter and thinking about the differences between a formal and informal letter. 

Maths started with the year 4s looking at negative numbers, placing them on number lines, thinking about 1 more or less and then moving to word problems and interpreting tables based around temperature. The year 3s looked at multiplication and division and how we can use the fact that they are inverse operations to solve number problems. We all moved on to multiplication using the grid method towards the end of the week, some of multilpying 2 digit numbers by 1 digit, 2 digit by 2 digit or 3 digit by 1 digit!

In Science we are learning about flowering plants. This week we started our experiment to see how the supply of water, soil, light, space, air and temperature will affect the growth of our bean seedlings. We will monitor the growth through the coming weeks. We investigated how plants absorb water and recreated what happens using role play! We also tried to see how quickly a plant absorbs water depending on the temperature. We added blue food colouring to water and stood some white flowers in a vase. We placed 1 vase outside in the cold, one in the classroom and one on a radiator. We were hoping to see a colour change in the petals but annoyingly nothing happened! Mrs Claridge will buy some different white flowers next week and see if we can get it to work next time!  

Please can everyone bring in a plastic container on Tuesday. We will be making a Greek salad and want to bring it home to share with you. We will be handwashing thoroughly and regularly!  

Homework is to continue to spend as much time as possible on your times tables, ideally every day. Remember to record when and what you practise in a table in your homework book. Make sure you practise all of the tables you have already learned. Year 4s please look at all the tables up to 12 x.