LKS2 – Newsletter – 25.06.21

LKS2 have had a great third week back.

In English, we have been continuing with the planning of our stories following our current topic book: This Morning I Met a Whale by Michael Morpurgo. We have been using expanded noun phrases to describe a talking animal of our choice in a strange and unknown habitat. Our animals then have expressed a message in need of help based on a topic around climate change.

This week in maths, we have been topping up our fluency skills and recapping some of the topics we have already learnt. On Tuesday, we recapped columnar addition and subtraction and then answered one, two and multi-step word problems as well as reasoning questions. Wednesday’s lesson was based around multiplication and division using the written methods. Again, we all smashed the skill so were able to then use this skill in many ways. Yesterday, we focused on negative numbers which has been a fairly new skill this year. Miss Boyd was amazed at how well we all understood the concept of negative numbers. Today, we are looking at tenths and hundredths (decimals to two decimal places).

We continued our science topic of plants this week. We discussed what plants need to grow and survive, and how they makes food using photosynthesis. We compared different plants like cacti and sunflowers, and identified that different types of plants grow best in different conditions. Then we set up an experiment to answer the question: what do plants need to grow? We carefully planted sunflower seeds in 8 different pots. 2 pots will receive water and sunlight, and 2 pots will receive water but no sunlight. 2 pots will receive no water but sunlight, and 2 will receive no water and no sunlight! We are looking forward to observing what happens to our pots over the next few weeks.

This week, LKS2 had another fantastic ‘Rethink Food’ session. We refreshed our memory on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, and learned about the COP26 meeting which is taking place in November. We discussed positive action, and how these goals will only be achieved if big changes are made. We focused in on one goal, ‘Life Below Water’, and the children came up with ideas on how to protect the oceans to achieve the goal. Then we picked our best idea and wrote down the advantages and disadvantages of our solution. There was some fantastic creativity and critical thinking throughout the afternoon.

A huge congratulations and well done to our learnatics this week.