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Layton Class

Year 3 and year 4 make up Layton Class.

The class teacher is Mrs Dear.

Autumn 2024

We started our year by sharing the wonderful book ‘The Wild Robot’. Set in North America, it is the beautiful story of a robot whose prime directive is to care for others; and what that looks like when you are shipwrecked on an island and the ‘others’ are all wild animals and very nervous of their new visitor.

The book tied in beautifully with our geography work on North America, and inspired our non-chronological reports in English. The children were very proud of their animal reports, and enjoyed reading them in our class assembly.

To celebrate National poetry day, we took part in a poetry writing lesson, led by poet Nikita Gill. She introduced the children to blackout poems and we went on to explore other writing styles. The class then wrote their own poems and we recorded them in our own ‘poetry slam’ where the children performed them for an audience.

In maths, we have been doing lots of work on place value, leading to our addition and subtraction topic.  The children have used their place value mats and counters, and our Base ten resources, to support their knowledge of ‘ten’ and to understand how to exchange when using formal methods.

Our science topic has been living things and their habitats. We have explored different ways to group living things using Venn and Carroll diagrams, and created our own classification trees. The children have created their own creatures, designing them with features that show how they have adapted to their environment and we are now looking at the reasons why a habitat might change and a species may become endangered.

 

In our RE lessons we have been exploring Hindu beliefs and celebrations. The children made their own board games to explore beliefs about reincarnation and we learnt how Hindus worship at home, creating our own shrine in the classroom.                                                                                                                                                                                            We heard about the festival of Navratri and the Goddess Durga, who defeated the demon Mahishasura. We made Dandiya, sticks used in dances to represent her swords.

We are finishing the term by exploring Christian beliefs, working to understand the meaning of advent candles, Christingles and the Christmas story. Layton class have also been working towards a Christmas concert and we are all looking forward to visiting our local church, as well as singing at the official opening of our new forest school area.

Spring 2024

We started the year off with a fantastic pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk.  Layton class have written their own versions of the story, complete with book covers and blurbs.  We have been debating who is really causing the problems in the story. Is it the Giant, terrorising the village? Or perhaps none of this would have happened if Jack had not bought those magic beans!

We have lots to look forward to this term.

In our English, we are going to be using another wonderful book, Until I met Dudley.  Dudley is a dog who knows how everything works and will be helping us to write instructions using imperative verbs.

 

In History we are continuing to explore the Roman Empire and will look at how life changed in Britain after the conquest.

In Science,  we are moving on to our plant topic, learning about the different parts of a plant and the functions of each part. We will devise our own experiment to find out what a plant needs to germinate, and to grow.

In Science, we are exploring States of Matter.  We made predictions about raisins in lemonade and recorded the results. Mrs Dear said that rice was a liquid because we can pour it, but we tested her theory and proved that it was a solid

Summer 2024- Kingswood

We loved our residential trip away to Kingswood in Norfolk. We took part in some really fun (and sometimes nerve-wracking) activities such as archery, climbing, zip-wire and fire lighting. We even had time to visit the beach!