Beech Tree Class Blog 2023-2024
Beech Tree Blog
Weekly Update-18/2/22
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, we started reading the fourth chapter of Grandpa Chatterji (this is my favourite chapter) and the children have absolutely loved it. We've all been hoping that Grandpa Chatterji and Grandpa Leicester would eventually meet and this chapter finally delivers that. It's such a lovely chapter, which made us all smile and giggle. The class have been so engaged with it, we've had wonderful discussions, they've demonstrated how good their scanning and inference skills have become and it has inspired the children to produce some brilliant writing.
In maths, we have continued our work on perimeter and area, which the children have really enjoyed doing and they've shown a lot of confidence with.
As part of our topic work, the focus was around Fairtrade. We had some absolutely brilliant discussions about it, the children shared some fantastic opinions, asked important questions and understood just how important this is. As part of the lesson, the children played a role playing game. A selection of children were the farmers and a selection were the buyers for the supermarkets. The idea of the game was to get the sellers to make sure that they set an absolute minimum price that they could sell for, in order to be able to cover their costs, but also see if they could negotiate for a bit more, in order to have extra money for things like education and medicine for their families. For the buyers, the aim was to get them to understand that they have to pay a fair price for what they are buying, they can't try and get it for a ridiculously cheap price because it's unfair and wrong to do that. The children absolutely loved the game and negotiated with each other really well, but most importantly, they understood why it's so important for the farmers (sellers) to get a fair price and what that can do for them and their families.
I hope you all have a lovely week off, make sure to look after yourselves and stay safe :)
Mr Kyriacou :)
Weekly Update 11/2/22
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
It was really lovely to see all of the parents this week, and for you to see the children's progress and the brilliant work that they have been producing.
This week, we have been focusing on perimeter in maths, which continues our work on measurement. The children have been working really hard and really challenging themselves with trickier problems involving perimeter.
In science, we have continued our work around states of matter - this week focusing on the water cycle. As part of our lesson on the water cycle, we created our own simulation of the water cycle by using plastic bottles and water. The water inside evaporates as it heats up and goes from a liquid to a gas (water vapour), then, as it rises, it starts to cool down, this is condensation, where the water vapour turns back into a liquid, in the form of tiny droplets of water. We then move onto precipitation - this is when the water condenses in the air and becomes heavy and eventually falls back down to the Earth in the form of rain, hail, sleet or snow. These bottles have been sitting in the classroom all week and we have been watching the cycle repeating itself, which has really helped the children to understand the concept of how the water cycle works and to use the correct scientific language when explaining it. The children have absolutely loved this topic and been so engaged.
I hope you all have a good weekend.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou :)
4/2/22
Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog
Hello everyone,
This week, we have been focusing on features of a diary entry and the children have been writing their own diary entries in the role of Sanjay, a character from Grandpa Chatterji, The diary entry revolved around the events of the third chapter, where the family go to a fair and go on lots of different rides. It's a very funny chapter and it provided lots of great material for the children to base their diary entries on. We have just been editing them today and read some out together. There were some great examples, which included all the features necessary and made us all giggle as well.
In maths, we have been continuing with measurement, converting between different units of measurement. We have done a lot of work on place value mats to help the children understand what the digits are doing when you are converting between different units of measurement.
As part of our topic work, the children mapped out multiple routes, that had to go overland, from the UK to India. They first did this using Google Earth and we discussed the various different routes that the children came up with. We then used an atlas to plot out the route on a map and label the countries that we went through. The children absolutely loved this two part lesson and were brilliant at using an atlas and locating the different countries.
We also did a spice testing challenge. There were five different spices from India, the children had to look at them, smell them and describe them. Then, they had to guess which spice was which. The children really enjoyed it and it made the whole class want to make some Indian food.
Take care,
Mr Kyriacou :)