Trip to the farm
EARLY YEARS
We started the week with a fantastic trip to Hortus Farm in Canoves. We really enjoyed meeting and taking care of the animals and we also took the ponies for a walk! We have been very excited about the Music Recital today. Some of us have been getting ready for piano performances and all of us have been practising the song, ‘Naughty’ with our best singing voices! We all enjoy the music lessons and like to play with percussion instruments in the class too during Circle Time. We are getting very good in Dance during PE class and we absolutely loved making fresh orange juice in Cooking - yum! We are going to learn about Health and Hygiene after the holidays so we are thinking about healthy foods and trying to make healthy choices. In Topic we will be looking at a new traditional tale, ‘The Gingerbread Man’.
PRIMARY
We started the week by writing our diaries and then we moved on to writing about our islands. Some of us have been making an extra effort to use interesting adjectives in our written work, and some of us are also working hard to use joined up handwriting. In Science we learned about magnets, magnetic fields and the attracting and repelling force of opposite poles in a magnet. We learned that not all metals have magnetic properties. We made games using magnets. In topic we have been practising our coordinates knowledge from maths to read a treasure map and find treasure in our own patio. In maths we have also continued to look at strategies for answering both written and number questions in a test setting. We have been practising the Naughty song from Matilda, as well as our instruments ready for the Friday recital.
SECONDARY
English
We have been looking at adverbs and adverbial phrases. Some of us have started reading a new novel and making predictions about the novel from both the content and the language structures we noticed. Others have been looking at the criteria for writing diary entries, using Bradley Chalkers’s character. This way we learn about taking notice of a charater’s implicit motivations and feelings, as well as developing an important writing technique. We have been thinking about planning appropriately when writing non-fiction and we have looked at several planning models that might help us organise our ideas.
MATHS
We are calculating at all levels how to change mass, length, area and capacity units: you have to multiply or divide depending if you are going to smaller or bigger units. Again the pupils are practising multiplying or dividing by powers of ten (ten, hundred, thousand, million...). Therefore you only need to know where the point is moving and how many positions.
At Geometry Level 1 is measuring angles wiith the protactor, while Level 2 is looking for the perpendicular line of a segment to be able to draw the hypotenuse of a triangle rectangle given the sizes.
PHYSICS
We did four of the presentations to primary. To get the little ones motivated you have to have objects to touch and you have to be sure that they are understanding. Anyhow, they are not going to read a very long text without images!
The pupils have learned that there is night and day because the Earth is spinning every 24 hours. Not because the sun is moving! We have learned about the directions: East for Sunrise, South, and then West for Sunset. So the Sun is never at North.
CHEMISTRY
We have introduced the Non Metal Elements and their properties in contrast to this bigger group that are the Metal Elements. We have seen that the Use of non metals is related to their properties: Helium is used to inflate balloons because of its low density then it floats in the air!
BIOLOGY
We have talked about Louis Pasteur how he observed that in the process of Fermentation to Wine or Beer there is always Yeast, little microorganisms that use the sugar and make alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste products. When there are bacteries the fermentation process does not take place and we get vinegar. It is analogue to when there are bacteria in the milk we get Sour milk. To kill these bacteria but not destroy the wine or the beer or the milk Pasteur proposed to warm for a while just the temperature and time enough to kill the bacteria. This process is called Pasteurisation.
GEOGRAPHY;
We are doing an exam on the 7th of March. For this reason, we reviewed all the information that we have learned so far and that may be on the exam. Now, everybody has an outline of the units we have to study. In addition, we concluded with an interesting activity about mental maps (maps that we carry around in our head). These types of maps show what is important to the person who drew them. To understand it better, everyone sketched their own mental map of Catalonia and then compared it among themselves.
HISTORY:
This week we had the last History lesson before the exam (1st March). We emphasized what we have learned about the Anglo-Saxon society; we talked about hierarchy and completed a social pyramid by classifying social groups according to their importance (privileges, power, wealth, freedom). To understand it better we saw a video about the Anglo-Saxon period.
