Term one - Was the Anglo-Saxon period really a Dark Age?

Welcome to the Honeybee Class! We hope that you have had a relaxing summer holiday with friends and family. We are all so excited to be back after the summer holidays and we look forward to getting to know and work with everyone. We have lots of fun, engaging learning taking place this term. 

Our Enquiry this term is driven by History and our question is 'Was the Anglo-Saxon period really a Dark Age?'. Our History learning this term chronologically builds upon our previous learning of the Romans. Our writing genres this term are instructions and narrative and in Maths we are learning more about place value as well as addition and subtraction. 

Our engaging learning will be posted on our Class Page. 

English 

This term, we are developing our story writing as we write a quest narrative using paragraphs and a range of grammar including punctuation for parenthesis. We will work through our writing cycle to create a final published piece that we be displayed in school and shared with our Year 6 class. 
 

We enjoyed retrieving our learning of word classes from previous years as well as being introduced to modal verbs. We were able to successfully categorise the words into their word class. 

We showed a great understanding of the importance of setting and character descriptions as we used our previously collated ambitious vocabulary to create our own descriptions in preparation for our quest writing. 

Maths

This term we are building on our previous learning of place value and addition and subtraction. 

We used place value counters to represent different numbers, retrieving our learning of the ten thousand columns. We showed great security with the place value of different numbers. 

Art 

This term, we are learning how to print using polystyrene blocks. Our inspirational artist is Edward Bowden and we will be working through our art cycle to create our own Anglo-Saxon crosses. 

We began our learning by using the language of art and design to analyse the work of Edward Bowden, providing an opinion of his art work. 

French 

This term we are learning about a variety of French foods and drinks as we explore the ‘French menu’. 

French and Pictionary? We call it Frenchionary. We learnt how to pronounce different foods in French through playing a game of Pictionary. We have some brilliant artists and bilingual children in the Honeybee class! 

Physical Education 

We are learning about health related exercise in our lessons this term so that we can better understand how to stay healthy and improve our fitness. 

We completed a baseline assessment in our first lesson of the term so that we can compare it to our final assessment. This will allow us to analyse the effectiveness of the exercises we will be completing in weeks 2-5. Our assessment required us to partake in a range of aerobic exercises as quickly as we could. 

Our learning continued as we created and completed an aerobic circuit. We were able to identify which parts of our body each exercise was working on and what the health benefits of these exercises are. 

Enquiry

Our enquiry question this term is ‘Was the Anglo-Saxon period really a Dark Age?’ In our learning, we will analyse a range of sources and evidence from the past to learn about and evaluate her time period in which the Anglo-Saxons lived. 

In our first lesson, we visited our school timeline so that we could place the Anglo-Saxon period in its chronological order with other historical time period that we have studied in previous years. We learnt that the Anglo Saxons invaded England in 500AD and theorised as to why they chose to settle there. 

Computing 

We are learning how to create our own game in our Computing lessons this term. This will require us to learn about algorithms before planning, creating and testing our game. 

Our learning commenced as we learnt that an algorithm is a sequence of steps. We explored games that we play and the algorithms within them. This enabled us to create a plan for our own games, requiring us to think carefully about the algorithms we will include and how to show this in our plan. 

Music 

We are very lucky this term to have a music teacher coming in to teach us about music composition. 

We learnt about the notes that are used to compose music, showing great curiosity in our learning as we found out what each musical note meant. 

Science 

We are learning about properties and changes of materials this term. By the end of our learning we will learn about the different properties that materials have and how they can change. We will be able to evaluate which properties are the most suitable for different purposes and support our answer with scientific evidence. 

Today, we created and conducted a fair and comparative test to find out which material is the most suitable for using as a carrier bag. We recorded our results in a table and a bar chart and drew our own conclusions using the evidence from our results. We enjoyed conducting our experiment and ensuring we are clear on the dependent and independent variables.