Another whirlwind week! How are we at the end of week 3 of this half term already? 

Maths this week has been extremely busy. The children have been consolidating mental methods for addition and subtraction. We spent the first lesson using rounding to estimate - a very useful skill for checking whether actual answers to calculations seem accurate. We then moved onto looking at the place value of digits to add and subtract mentally. Again, if children develop these skills, they improve their speed and accuracy and can avoid using written methods unnecessarily. We will continue mental methods next week before moving onto formal written methods.

In English, children have continued their learning around biographies. They have been learning how to use subordinating conjunctions to link independent and dependent clauses before learning how to use relative clauses to add extra information. 

We began our Geography unit this week. The children used atlases to look for towns and cities in a range of countries. They also looked at identifying the grid reference as well as the latitude and longitude to describe the location of places. 

In Science, we have moved onto learning about forces. In the first lesson, the children learnt briefly about what different types of forces there are and what they can do.