Literacy

This half term, we have looked closely at the Oaks Colliery Disaster. We gathered information about what happened and made inferences about how the people involved would be feeling. Our end outcome was to write a newspaper report from the time about the disaster.

In order to do this, we looked at lots of different features and skills included in a newspaper report such as direct and indirect speech, formal language, possessive apostrophes, fronted adverbials, parenthesis, and expanded noun phrases.

Here are some of our Newspaper reports that we created as a final piece during our literacy unit.

Maths

We have explored a variety of mathematical concepts such as fractions and decimals, measures, geometry, statistics, and position and direction. We also recapped the four operations.

LIRA

In LIRA, we have looked at the non-fiction text You Wouldn’t Want to be a Victorian Miner.

We also looked at the fictional story Canary in the Coal Mine which told the story from the canary's perspective.

Topic

Life in the Mines

Our focus this half term has been History. In our topic, we explored coal mining in the UK, particularity in Barnsley. We developed a variety of skills to make us fantastic Historians.

PSHE / RSE

We have explored different problems that children may face and how they can overcome these. The children have participated in great discussions around bullying, trust, and friendships.

Christmas at Mapplewell

Lots of festive activities have taken place at school on the run-up to Christmas. We made cards, calendars and baubles!

We also really enjoyed our Rudolph Run, raising money for Barnsley Hospice! Thank you to everyone for your kind donations.

and recording our Christmas song...

Next Half term...

Topic

Next half term, we will be focusing on DT in our topic 'The Wand Chooses the Wizard'. The staff in Year 3/4 have been in contact with a rather MAGICAL school to help us with this (no muggles allowed). We will be making a specific item that will help us in our journey!

To do this, we will be building on our planning, making and evaluating skills.

Literacy & LIRA

Our topic will link in with our Literacy and LIRA. We will focus on plugging any gaps that the children have not yet covered or need to be revisited.

Our first piece of writing will be an advertisement where we will focus on persuasive language.

Our second piece of writing will be a character description where we will develop our range of ambitious and interesting vocabulary.

Maths

We will be exploring and delving deeper into place value, the four operations, fractions, decimals and percentages. We will build upon our knowledge from Autumn term and apply more complex reasoning skills to embed our understanding.

PSHE / RSE

In PSHE / RSE, we will be focusing on Safety and the Changing Body. We will discuss topics such as emergency services, taking care of your health, online safety, as well as puberty.

PE

Get your dancing shoes on because next half term, our PE focus will be dance!