This term in Oak class our topic has been ‘Water is life – no blue, no green’ and we have been learning all about the water on our planet, especially rivers.
In English, we have been developing our creative writing this term. We started out with a lovely short film about a little red boat and wrote some beautiful Haiku poems about it. We then continued our poetry work looking at a classic poem: ‘The Sea’ by James Reeves. In this poem, the sea is made into a ‘hungry dog, giant and grey,’ and in our own metaphor poems we made a river into all sorts of things, including a snake, a crocodile and a playful cat. For the remainder of the term, we have been working on a wordless picture book called ‘Flotsam.’ We have retold the story in our own words and explored the incredible underwater worlds that the boy in the story sees captured by the underwater camera.      
We enjoyed a fantastic storytelling workshop with author Tọlá Okogwu for National Storytelling Week and found that we are GUINESS WORLD RECORD BREAKERS for taking part in the world’s biggest poetry lesson back in October!  

In maths, Oak class started the term getting to grips with written methods of multiplication and division, including long multiplication and division for years 5 and 6, and bus stop division for year 4. They have also been finding fractions of quantities and using all four operations to calculate with fractions. We had a fantastic day for the NSPCC’s Number Day, playing lots of number games and working in teams to create a park, sticking to a budget and producing a scale drawing of our designs. We do lots of reading for pleasure – it was great to do maths for pleasure for a change!
          
            

In geography we have researched local and world rivers and found out about the journey that a river takes on its course, using technical vocabulary such as ‘tributary’, ‘meander’, ‘confluence’ and ‘erosion’ accurately in our written work. We were also lucky enough to have a workshop with Phil from Severn Trent water, who shared lots of interesting information about the water on our planet – including the fact that we drink the same water as the dinosaurs, and the only water that has left our planet in millions of years is the small amount that has been taken up to space. Wow!

Our science work has focused on materials this term; we started out thinking about the properties of materials and investigating thermal insulators and conductors, before moving on to learning about states of matter – solids, liquids and gases – relating this to the Water Cycle and everyday examples such as washing drying. In computing, we have learnt about search engines and how to search efficiently for information.

In RE, Oak have continued learning about Hinduism this term, thinking about what it means to be a Hindu in Britain today. In PSHE they have been thinking about money – identifying their feelings about money and learning about the importance of monitoring their money and keeping it safe. 
         
For PE this term, Oak have been developing their gymnastics, putting together sequences including balances, jumps and rolls. 
In music, we have been thinking about how we can explore our feelings through the songs that we sing and play. We learnt a song called ‘Looking in the Mirror,’ which most of us decided we liked the meaning of but didn’t like the way it sounded – we preferred it when we sang it ourselves! 
Another busy term in Oak class!