Layton Class

Year 3 and year 4 make up Layton Class. The class teacher is Mrs Wittich.

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 2025

We kicked the year off with another great pantomime, this time, Cinderella. Layton class thought it was fantastic, and were inspired to write theatre reviews. Five stars for this panto!

We read another version of the story, The Egyptian Cinderella, and the children wrote their own twists of the story, and designed Egyptian style headdresses for Cinderella to wear to her wedding.

In English, we carried on the link to our Egyptian topic by writing instructions for an apprentice embalmer. With such great use of time adverbials and imperative verbs, we are sure our trainee would have performed everything perfectly, and sent his ‘customer’ off for a great afterlife!

Our History topic taught us lots about life in Ancient Egypt. We now understand how important the river Nile was and learnt to use research and critical thinking to answer questions like ‘who built the pyramids?’

In science, we explored light and sound. Layton class investigated sources of light and conducted experiments to discover the reflective qualities of materials.

In our sound topic, we used a data logger to record sound levels, and evaluated the results of our sound experiments to decide if they were fair tests. We also had a great workshop with Dan from the School of Noise, who showed us so many different ways to see and hear sound. We also had the chance to become Foley Artists, creating sound effects for silent films.

In art, we have made use of our knowledge of history and Ancient Egypt to create montages as self portraits in the style found in tombs. By using montage, we were able to use photography to capture our profile portraits to use to keep a likeness of ourselves in the portraits.

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!