Summer Term (Disaster Zone!) | Pencaerau Primary School

Monday 15th – Friday 26th June

We have been busy the last fortnight with our topic work. We have been to the I.T. suite and done lots of independent research on tsunamis in preparation for a disaster story writing session. We found out lots of interesting facts including why they are called “tsunamis”. Ask your child to see if they remember why? We performed an experiment where we constructed our own tsunamis using water, mud, model houses and trays. The experiment was not a great success but we concluded that houses on higher ground are a lot safer. We looked at the use of Mercalli scales too, to see how disasters are measured. All this was really good preparation, and our stories were full of interesting facts and details.

In language we’ve been practicing apostrophes, commas and paragraphs which we tried to include in our stories. In maths we have done a variety of things such as doubling and halving, symmetry and work with 3D shapes. We are getting more confident at maths and are learning to check our answers by doing the inverse operation. We’ve been using mirrors to see how accurate our symmetrical drawings were and we’ve played with 3D shapes and labelled the properties of them including vertices, edges and faces.

In Welsh we’ve been playing lots of games and getting into roles and talking about the weather. We’ve been using complex phrases such as “Roedd y tywydd yn braf ddoe, ond heddiw dwi’n gwisgo cot achos mae hi’n bwrw glaw” Ask your child if they can come up with sentences using this pattern.

Sports day was a great success again this year. Photos, list of winners and a report will follow in due course.

Monday 1st – Friday 12th June

We began the new term and topic by looking at the Nepal Earthquake disaster. The children went to the I.T. suite and did lots of research; they found out the scale of the quake, the number of people killed and the place it struck and lots more. They then wrote up what they found in the form of a report and then word processed it and edited the format of the text. Keeping on the earthquake theme, we looked in to how earthquakes happen. We discovered what the earth is like in the middle and some of us made clay models of the earth showing all the inner layers. We also built our own seismometers and simulated an earthquake to see it work.

In maths we have been doing all different types of problems using odd and even numbers. We have also been doing problem solving such as how much aid can be given to the victims of the earthquake if we give so much money to charity. We have also been carrying out an investigation about how many different animals Noah had on the Ark. We learnt about Noah’s Ark as it fit in well with our Disaster Zone topic. The children are loving the topic so far!

In other areas we have been trying to improve our punctuation by using commas, apostrophes, exclamation marks, question marks and speech marks. In Welsh we have been learning all about the weather. The children’s Welsh is coming on leaps and bounds and I am having a difficult time in getting them to speak English now! We have been talking about the weather in the past tense and talking about what they do if the weather is sunny, which is appropriate with the recent nice weather we’ve been having. We have also been reading Welsh books and finding Welsh books on the ipad to read and review.