The Deep

We had a fantastic trip to The Deep in Hull on Wednesday.  We had a workshop where we learnt about how sea animals are different to us, and how they survive under water.  We played some ICT games, tried to guess animals hidden inside mermaids purses, and did some observational drawing of some tiny shrimps that we had to look at through magnifying glasses.

After that, it was time to explore The Deep.  We saw some fantastic things... our favourites were the coral tank, the megladon jaws, jelly fish and the shark tank.

There were some incredible colours!

The jellyfish looked great under special lights.

The tanks were huge!

We went through a tunnel and saw sharks swimming above us.

Pirates and Mermaids

Our new topic is called Pirates and Mermaids.  We are learning all about map making, life processes and sea animals, and we'll be doing some great arts and crafts.

We started the topic with a dressing up day and did lots of art work.

Even Mr Littlewood dressed up!

We had a letter from a pirate that said his treasure had been lost overboard and he was going to dive to the bottom of the sea to find it.  He asked for our help in identifying some of the animals he might see, and whether any animals are dangerous.

We are going to The Deep on Wednesday so maybe we will find out then.

Map making

On Tuesday we made treasure maps.  Mr Littlewood gave us each a chocolate coin and we had to go and hide it on the field or in the yard.  We had to pretend we were a bird looking down from the sky and draw all the features of the field and yard.  We drew the trim trail, willow arch, the throne, the outside classroom, climbing wall and much more.

After we had hidden our coins we had to write instructions on the back of the map using the "first, next, then, finally structure" and use lots of positional language like 'left', 'right', 'behind', 'under' and 'above'.

Map making

Writing instructions



Searching for our partner's treasure.



Trying to solve the clues.

3D shapes

This week we have been learning about 3D shapes.  We have been learning new vocabulary like 'face', 'edge' and 'vertices' and labeling shapes.  We have also been building our own 3D shapes out of Polydron and artstraws.

I made a cube

We built lots of 3D shapes

Great resilience is shown building this mega 3D shape!

Practicing our new vocabulary.

Data Handling

This week we have looking at different ways of sorting data so that we can understand it more easily.  We looked at tally charts, block graphs and pictograms.  Here are some pictures of us trying out the different activities.

Practically Perfect Penguin Pictures

This afternoon we have done some absolutely fantastic observational drawing.  We talked about what makes a successful observational drawing and decided to pay really close attention to shape, colour and detail.

After completing our drawings we labelled them to show the features of a penguin.  We also self-assessed our work, recognising that some of us needed to include more detail, or use more of the paper, or think more about the colours that we use.

We are all very proud of our work.

Number graffiti

SSShhhh! Don't tell Mr Burden... but to help us with our missing number tracks we've been writing on the tables.  We did clean it all off though!

We took turns in filling in the missing numbers.

I'm sorting out the numbers... some of them need moving.

Igloo building

As part of our pole to pole topic we have been thinking about how people live.  As well as describing our own environment, we have been researching how people live in other continents such as Africa and South America.  Today provided the ideal opportunity to think about how difficult it would be to build an igloo... so we tried it!

Here are some photos of what we managed... before we got too cold!

We found out that it was really difficult!  Back in class we drew pictures of igloos and tried building them out of various construction materials.

Experts in our field.

This week we have done lots of research on Africa, looking at all the different natural environments and wildlife, and also human features such as housing and cities.  Then we made information posters to help us with a special job the next day.

Zebras live in the savannah.  This is a giraffe. They fight with their horns.

In South Africa they have a plateau and in the water they are sharks.

Elephants suck the water to give their babies a bath.

After we had made our posters we had to get in to small groups with the Meerkats and teach them all about Africa.  In turn they told us loads of interesting facts about South America.  Back in the classroom we talked about some of the facts that we had learned about South Africa and began to discuss some of the similarities and differences.

Balloon lift-off

As part of our pole to pole topic, we began to think about the area that we live in.  We thought about the questions we had asked about other countries and whether we could answer those questions about our own locality.  We developed a mind map of  all the things we know about Sheffield and the UK, from the environment to the climate; from favorite foods to the clothes we wear; from eating habits to pets.

We each then wrote a local fact on to a piece of card that also had  a QR code on it with our blog address and contact details so that people can reply to us, and released these 'messages' attached to helium balloons.

It was so exciting!  It was a very still day so we could see the balloons go up, up, UP!

We used a compass to see which direction the balloons had traveled and then predicted where the messages may end up by looking on a map.  The balloons went East, so we think we might get replies from Lincolnshire, Scandinavia or even Russia!

Putting the value in place value.

This week in maths we've been learning about place value... bundling together '10's of straws to help us with our partitioning.

Can you try this at home?
Practice using arrow cards.

We also used our knowledge of place value with some money problems, thinking of 10p pieces as 'bundles' of 10 1p pieces.

The alphabet of nations

Hi Monkeys!

There are hundreds of countries in the world.  Here is a song that names a country that starts with each letter of the alphabet... but there's an odd one out! can you spot it?

Pole to pole

We started back today with our new topic.  Someone had left a big rucksack in our classroom filled with all kinds of strange things like walking boots, a camping stove and a compass.  A ripped out page from a diary was at the bottom of the bag, it helped us work out that the bag belonged to an explorer who was traveling the world.

We started to think about all the continents that the explorer would be visiting and wrote down questions about various places that we would like to find out about on post-it notes, then we stuck these on a big world map.  Our questions ranged from finding out about food, homes, wildlife, environments and religion.