Cathedral

Reminders:

PE is on Fridays -  come into school in your PE kit

Spellings are taught on a Monday afternoon 

Homework is given on a Friday and marked on a Thursday (paper copies are given to all children to complete in their homework books)

Please click on the links below for more information:

Term 6

Class Newsletter   Curriculum map  Miss Driscoll's Spelling Group List    Mrs Gerolemou's Spelling Group List

Home Learning: Half Term Week 1 Week 2 Week 4

Week 4

First of all, how fantastic was the arts exhibition! The children were so proud of all of their creations and the whole school did an incredible job - we have so much talent at Cathedral Primary School! This week, we have done lots of exploration of angles, but it was really important to remember all the angle facts we know to help us problem solve! We have also begun to write a newspaper report about the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb but we have changed history a little to make it even more exciting! Our preparations for our Summer Concert are coming along nicely - we are practising our poem performance and really thinking about how to perform rather than just read. Our songs sound amazing - we're excited for you to hear us! 

Week 3

Big Arts Week has been a huge success and it has been wonderful to see the creativity of Soul Class! Without giving too much away, as I'm sure lots of you are excited to attend the exhibition next Friday, we have been using bubbles, prints and sound to create some beautiful and thoughtful art this week. Not only have we been getting creative in the classroom, but we were also lucky enough to be part of a modelling session with Jim from Aardman studios! In this, we were given plasticine to model our very own Gromits - it was important to remember to listen very carefully to the amount needed. We also got to practise our understanding of fractions during this workshop! Just because it was Big Arts Week, we didn't stop striving to achieve and some of us attended the 24 competition and Victoria Park Primary School on Thursday morning. We showed fantastic manners, encouragement and sportsman/womanship when competing and even managed to secure two places in the finals! Well done, Soul Class! As tempting as it is to share photos of the week, we will leave it to the exhibition for our first display of what we have been up to - we hope you are excited!

NB: No home learning was given out this week and we will be checking Week 3's spellings and giving Week 4's on Monday (we will be a week behind) due to art week. Apologies if this has caused any issues. 

Practising any spellings at home will be extremely helpful so please do not worry if you have been practising Week 4's!

Week 2

What a busy week! In English, we have been collaboratively creating a class poem which is almost finished - our next task is to learn how to perform it! We also began thinking about writing a newspaper and using different names for people or objects to avoid repetition (including using pronouns). We continued our learning of imperial units and conversion in maths, using feet and inches to measure ourselves and other items in the classroom.  We also began measuring angles accurately, using protractors. However, because of the two measurements on it, it was quite tricky sometimes; we used our knowledge of the size of angles (and the important rule to always start measuring from 0!). We have already started planning some of our art work in preparation for next week's Big Art Week! 

Week 1

Here we are, in the Summer term already! We are enjoying our last term already and have been having a very 'hands-on' week! We learnt the Egyptian creation story on Monday and worked in pairs or threes to act out parts using expression and actions. We then began learning about the Sun God - Ra - who we are making a poem about as a class. In maths, we have been learning about weight and conversion. We have measured, weighed and applied our learning in real-life situations! Wednesday was Sports Day and we were lucky enough to have the sun peeking out for us. Everyone showed great sportsman/womanship and participated with determination and resilience. Well done to all of Soul Class and KS2! We continued with our websites this week which are looking great - we managed to photograph some of our work and add it to one of our webpages! Some of us started Bikeability too!

Week 5

Despite being the last week of term, Soul Class have continued to work extremely hard! This week, we explored the life of an Egyptian worker to understand how the pyramids were made. We know that friction was important for transporting the blocks and special tools were used. From this, we discussed the different ways to transfer weight through using levers and tested out balance and transfer using some classroom objects! 

We have also been focusing on position and direction this week. Using mirrors to check, we used squares to accurately count the distance of vertices (corners) from the mirror line and marked these on our grids! We then learnt how to translate and helped an Egyptian architect to re-design his kingdom by moving his temples, pyramids and features to better places - some of us even designed our own kingdoms!

After learning about Tutankhamun (and the many ways to spell his name!), we pretended to be Howard Carter and wrote his diary of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. We focused on show not tell to describe how he may have been feeling/what time of day it was, and built suspense with James Bond moments! However, feeling a little more creative, we decided to write an alternative ending for our Progress write and, in quite a few, Howard Carter didn't even survive! The focus was incredible!

Week 4

Our classroom is like an ancient Egyptian museum at the moment with our beautiful cartouches! They have been painted with such care - everybody was thinking hard about the colours and tones they wanted to use and then delicately added some gold! We worked hard mixing colours to get more neutral tones rather than the bright primary colours in our paint bottles! 

Percentages are our new favourite thing! We have found a clear relationship with our fractions and decimals and enjoyed finding equivalents and working out 'amounts of'. We even began finding percentages of amounts and looking at more than 100%! It's been amazing watching each others' confidence growing through the week.

With the help of lots of images and videos, we have learnt about Howard Carter and his incredible discovery in the Valley of The Kings. After lots of discovery and exploration of new words (like excavate and accustomed), we have begun to write a diary in the style of Howard Carter himself using some 'show not tell' devices to paint a really clear picture for our reader!

Week 3

We have been getting creative this week by getting our hands covered in clay! We have used our cartouche designs to create tablets with hieroglyphs to represent our names or initials. We were showing great resilience and learning from our mistakes as we went!

We have moved our learning on to decimals this week and began looking at the relationship between decimals and fractions - both being parts of something complete - but how decimals are always tenths or hundredths. From this, we investigated some fractions which would not convert into decimals without finding their equivalence, such as one half!

In English, we have began learning about Howard Carter and the excavation of Tutankhamen's tomb which was exciting. We have already looked at some new vocabulary (see if your child can remember some of the words!) and will be focusing on expressing our emotion through description (show not tell).

We made great progress in Brass this week and were all able to play two different notes! 

On Friday, local MP Thangam Debonaire visited us and the school council in the afternoon who taught us so much about parliament, the government and her role! We asked some fantastic questions and were able to suggest ideas to improve Bristol too! 

Week 2

This week, we have had loads of fun in maths as we took our learning and practising from our books and onto our tables! We were looking at the importance of diagrams and models to support finding fractions of amounts. It is important to remember that we are dividing by the denominator and therefore, sharing our amount into that many equal parts. 

We wrote our mummification instructions and had a big focus on adverbials to tell us when, where or how something needed to be done. These could come at the beginning of the sentence (fronted adverbials), as one word (adverbs) or as a few words (an adverbial phrase). See if they can explain to you how to mummify someone - lookout for those adverbials!

We continued our cartouche design this week, ready to start modelling with clay next week. We discussed how much gold we would like and the neutral tone of the colours we would use to ensure they look genuine. 

In our Brass lesson this week, we all managed to play a note on our trombones and cornets! Everyone had fuzzy lips afterwards from the vibrations - great progress!

We are looking at some new words this term. So far, we have discussed the following: preserve, sacred, hieroglyph, incision and controversial. Feel free to quiz us on the meaning or get us to use them in a sentence!

Week 1

After two weeks away, and a Bank Holiday Monday, I couldn't have been more impressed with the enthusiasm everyone brought back to the classroom this week! We have had some super learning in Soul Class - including a mummification of our classmate! We have began learning about the Ancient Egyptians and are loving the gore so far. We have looked at how they wrote and became code-breakers, before designing our own Egyptian cartouches which we will be making out of clay. 

From our mummification, we have began to write a set of instructions for somebody else to mummify a body and have a focus on the 'adverbial family' to make this as detailed as possible. We are trying to include subordinating clauses to make our writing really interesting. 

In maths, we have returned to fractions and I was delighted with how much everybody has remembered from term 4! This week, we were subtracting fractions, using models, and began looking at mixed numbers - we began a little off-put by the whole numbers but soon realised we could handle them!

We also began our brass lessons this week, which was a great success! We are excited to continue these every Thursday. 

Week 6

As always, we've worked our socks off right to the end of term, whilst enjoying maths week too! We had some super helpers who stayed on Thursday evening so a big thank you goes out to them! We started our week of with Captain Morgan and did some problem solving.

After our trip to Wild Place last week, we have been furthering our knowledge of some of the animals and this week, wrote our non-chronological report with a focus on some of the grammar and punctuation we now know. 

Miss Kelly came in to help us learn about responding to emergencies and we learnt what to do when somebody needs help. Have a look at our pictures of us practising the recovery position!

Have a lovely Easter break every body - we are already looking forward to next term!

Week 5

It's been a wild week in Soul Class with an incredible visit to Wild Place! We were able to explore animals and habitats that many of us had never seen before - some of us even managed to further our learning on the life cycle of plants with a mini dissection! We managed to see giraffes eating, cheetahs roaming, wolves on the prowl and even got very close to some lemurs! 

From this, we have been thinking about sharing our knowledge and have started planning our non-chronological reports about one of the animals we saw. We have already thought about some interesting titles and subheadings and are looking forward to writing these next week. We will be focusing on relative clauses, punctuation and the perfect tense - using having had or had been instead of simple past - were/was.

Our maths has been focusing on adding and subtracting fractions this week which we have worked really hard to do! We realised how important our Very Important Rule is when doing this and some of us are still building confidence here - you may find a support booklet in your child's bag which you can help your child with over the weekend!

Week 4

We have made great progress with our myths this week, writing them up beautifully on special rainforest paper and including our dialogue. It was tricky to remember so many rules when writing speech but we are certainly getting there! Some of us managed to show characterisation through our speech which was very impressive.

We had an exciting start to the week, dissecting a flower after learning about the life-cycle of plants. We learnt that some plants can pollinate themselves to reproduce - which we thought would be very helpful in case of an alien invasion which wiped out loads of the earth!

We got hands-on in maths, using cubes to support our understanding of finding fractions. The denominator tells us what to divide by and the numerator tells us how many of those groups we want! So to find a fraction, we divide by the bottom (denominator) and then multiply the answer by the top (numerator)!

Week 3

Science week blew us away! We enjoyed a visit from Mad Science where we watched some fascinating experiments, had a trip to the secondary school to learn about DNA and test out the journey of rockets, and also looked at the journey through life that different animals take - including us! 

Somehow, we still managed to fit in learning about sequences - which we decided were repeated patterns. We looked at sequences of number and began to develop a good understanding of sequences of fractions and how we just add or take away a little more each time. This was helped by using our yummy pizza fractions!

We also did some fantastic planning and introductions for our myths which we are basing on Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. I'm sure you've heard all about them by now! Some of us even did some feature spotting during Guided Reading! 

To top off this already busy week, we then visited a Sikh Gurdwara where we learnt all about Sikhism and were lucky enough to dine in the Langar Hall, listen to stories in the Diwan (Prayer Hall) and even went to the special bedroom where copies of the Guru Granth Sahib are kept. We couldn't have been prouder with Soul Class for their respect, curiosity and incredible abundance of facts!

Week 2

Was it Soul Class or was it a room full of fantastic book characters this week? What amazing costumes and enthusiasm we had! We have had a great time all week celebrating Book Week, reading stories, exploring writing our own, and also taking part in a quiz - winners to be announced next Tuesday! For World Book Day, as well as dressing up, we focused really hard and created our own origami books!

Week 1 

We’ve had a very busy first week back in Soul Class with lots of fantastic learning! We started off the week in our very own art gallery somewhere in the rainforest where we studied Henri Rousseau and tried some Brazilian fruit!

Then we explored some of Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So stories and thought about the way he makes them unique! We are going to be writing our own soon but until then, ask us to tell you one of the stories and see if we can remember the morals too! There have been some interesting repetition of words including ‘stute (astute) and ‘scrutiatingly idle (excruciatingly idle!) which we have enjoyed learning about.

The class blew me away with their understanding of division and multiplication from last term and are still super confident! We began looking at fractions this week and saw them as ‘equal parts of something that has been divided or split up’. We spent a couple of days on equivalent fractions - the same amounts - and got some cubes out to support improper fractions and mixed numbers! 

Please click on the links below for more information:

Class Newsletter   Curriculum map  Miss Driscoll's Spelling Group List    Mrs Gerolemou's Spelling Group List

Home Learning:  Week 1  Week 2  Week 3   Week 4   Week 6

11.02.19 - 15.09.19 (week 6)

If the kindness we have been showing in school has continued at home then I can only imagine the smiles that have been spreading! Soul Class have been thinking really hard about kindness this week and we have been sharing compliments with each other which have made us feel 'warm, loved, happy, confident and good about ourselves.' We are keeping ours in our trays so we can look at them if ever we feel a bit blue. 

We discussed our emotional responses to an image of a polar bear facing climate change which we found very distressing. This inspired us to write to the UN International Panel of Climate Change so they could reflect on the harmful things we do to our world! We had some extremely impressive letters which the panel may be quite intimidated by! 

Although some of us felt a little apprehensive, we worked super hard at tackling 4-digit division using the bus stop method and all impressed ourselves! The bus passenger method helped us - ask us to explain to you how it works! (We will also be bringing home a step-by-step guide to support us to keep practising this).

Our dog heads are looking great - we have used glue guns, fabric, paints and more to create some amazing junk modelling! Those of us who finished also started trying some origami too!

04.02.19 - 08.02.19 (Week 5)

This week, we have written up our beautiful poems using white gel pens on a navy piece of card and they not only sound amazing, but now look amazing too! We feel really confident with multiplication and are getting better and better at long multiplication - keep us practicing at home by asking us to work some out! 

We borrowed some science equipment from the secondary to explore gravity, air and water resistance. We also looked at friction and measured force in Newtons!

28.01.19 - 01.02.19 (Week 4)

We've been busy this week in Soul Class, continuing our learning journey in maths to begin long multiplication! We've learnt some rhymes too, to help us with some trickier times tables - ask us to tell you them - 6 x 8 (don't be late!), 6 x 6 (pick up sticks), 7 x 8 (5, 6, 7, 8), 6 x 7 (tie my shoe!). 

In English we have been spending lots of time preparing ideas for a piece of poetry we are writing about Antarctica. We have thought about all of our senses and how we can describe using upskilled adjectives from the thesaurus. There have been some excellent similes, metaphors and alliteration being used and next week, we will be adding prepositions to bring our poetry together! 

We didn't get round to creating our junk model dog heads yet but managed to plan what we were going to do and now just have to gather up all of our junk modelling materials so please send in anything you can!

21.01.19 - 25.01.19 (Week 3)

What a great week, Soul Class - well done! We have been working on our persuasive posters to sell the Polaris to Shackleton and, on Wednesday, we couldn’t have worked harder if we tried. The focus, effort and enjoyment was amazing during this writing and the result was even better! Make sure you check out a few examples in our photos!

We continued our learning on perimeter in maths and then moved onto area - and finding the area of irregular shapes where we had to really use our imagination to link up ‘part squares’. It can be quite tricky switching from perimeter to area as both require a different method but we showed great resilience.

Thursday was a really exciting day all across school as it was our Green Team Election Day. I couldn’t have been more impressed or proud watching the brave candidates deliver their campaigns. It was clear that all of them had put in so much effort - I wouldn’t have been able to vote as they were all so amazing! We have already taken on board some of the ideas suggested in lots of campaigns and this week, gave out our achievement assembly awards without laminating them! Well done to you all - I can’t wait to see the impact of our Green Team on our school!

In topic over the next few weeks, we are going to be creating some junk model dog faces just like the ones on Shackleton’s voyage. Please keep an eye out for any interesting scraps or bits of cardboard we could use - we will be really grateful for any donations!

10.01.19 - 14.01.19 (Week 2)

Soul Class finished their letters this week and ensured they were using some great conjunctions and cohesive devices (additionally, also, secondly, furthermore etc) to really make their writing shine. We began looking at creating a persuasive poster to sell the Polaris (The Endurance before it was renamed by Shackleton!). We have explored adjectives, rhetorical questions and describing and exaggerating facts about the ship. There is an example of some great sentences in our photos. Next week we will be continuing this and then creating our posters.

In maths, we delved further into multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1,000 by exploring decimals. We knew that the digits moved and their place value changed depending on whether we multiplied or divided, so we increased our confidence by moving them across the decimal line. It was useful to still use our place value chart though to avoid mistakes. We then began looking at perimeter and solving missing lengths. 

After discovering the Transantarctic Mountains in Antarctica, we began learning about mountains: what makes a mountain; when is a mountain just a hill; what a summit is; and how they are displayed in atlases and on google Earth. To help us understand contour lines, we had our very own mini hills and accurately measured around them to understand how contours are made. Have a look for yourself in our photos. 

07.01.19 - 11.01.19 (Week 1) 

Welcome back! We hope you had a restful and enjoyable Christmas and are excited for the New Year. We have already been sharing some ideas for New Year's Resolutions and have made our own to achieve. Since coming back on Monday, we have had our first trip to Failand for PE and had a fab time despite some looming mist which actually made it quite exciting!

We have enjoyed delving into our topic, learning about Ernest Shackleton and his eipc voyage to the South Pole - each of us have taken on the role of one of the crew members and we have begun to write a letter of application to be picked to join the crew of his ship, The Endurance! To make this letter stand out though, we had to think about conjunctions and creating complex sentences. One way of doing this was by saying what we were good at, how we were good at it and why it might be useful on board the ship. The difficult bit was putting each point in a different order!

Jumping straight back into our learning, we have enjoyed building our confidence in multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1,000 - ask us how to solve this: 4,500 ÷            = 45    

Our big focus this term is Geography, and this week in particular, we have already explored biomes, GMT, longitude, latitude and the equator. There was some excellent learning with regards to coordinates on a globe too! Well done Soul Class - it's great to be back!

10.12.18 - 13.12.18 (Week 6)

We can't believe it's the end of term already - and almost Christmas! After working their socks off over the past few weeks, we have had some well earned golden time this week and made some Christmas crafts. We started off the week with our Christmas Concert which we hope you thoroughly enjoyed - the children were amazing as always! As well as enjoying some Christmassy activities, we also worked hard to continue our learning with multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1,000 in maths and look forward to deepening our learning with this next term. The children also worked really hard in their assessed writing too which I'm looking forward to reading!

Merry Christmas to you all - enjoy a well earned rest!

03.12.18 - 07.12.18 (Week 5)

After finishing and editing our newspapers this week, we focused lots of our attention on guided reading and preparing for the Christmas Concert. In maths, we looked at multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1,000 using place value charts and counters to support our movements! 

26.11.18 - 30.11.18 (Week 4)

As if seeing our questions answered by a real astronaut wasn't enough excitement for this term, this week we got to handle meteorite and lunar rock! Not only that, we then went into the hall and crawled through a small hole into a planetarium where we met Ben who taught us even more about space and showed us some fascinating images on the dome above our heads. In English, we wrote a newspaper which told our audience all about Soul Class' experience with the rocks - it was tricky to write in third person when we had experienced it all ourselves! And in maths, we explored graphs and tables - in particular looking at data from space! To finish our busy week, we went to see The Railway Children at the theatre which was fantastic.

12.11.18 - 17.11.18 (Week 2)

As usual, a busy yet fab week in Soul class with lots of learning and light bulb moments! We delved further into the scientific part of our topic, exploring orbits, rotation, day and night, seasons, and the planets. We even looked at the word 'mnemonic' and made our own to remember the planet order - some made us really giggle!

In English, we applied our research on Stephen Hawking and began writing our biographies - slowing down and thinking about quality over quantity. The children have been learning about and practising using relative clauses as well as dashes (and brackets and commas!). Their writing so far has been amazing - we're looking forward to continuing next week! 

After practising our addition and subtraction methods, we applied our learning to problem solving and reasoning questions. There were lots of skills needed and a lot of thinking. We learnt how to use trial and error to solve certain problems.

Probably the most thrilling part of our week was watching some videos of Steve Swanson (a real astronaut who has been to space!) answer some of our questions which we asked at the beginning of term - we were so lucky to have been picked and felt really excited seeing our name and hearing our questions!

The videos are attached below but are quite large files - they should open in QuickTime Player.

Video 1    Video 2      Video 3      Video 4

05.11.18 - 09.11.18 (Week 1)

Welcome back! What a busy week we've had in Soul class! The children came back and delved straight into their topic by attending Junior Astronaut Training. During this, they challenged themselves and took part in various activities to test their concentration, fitness and perseverance! We've done some super learning in maths; we have been looking at decomposition and expanded methods for subtraction and challenging ourselves with challenges and puzzles! 

We have learnt so much already about space; using lots of different size balls (spheres) we estimated the relative size of the earth, sun and moon, and then measured them - roughly - to scale! It was quite amazing to see the difference in size and distance! We used a pencil in water to help us to reason and think about direct and indirect evidence. 

We have also started reading our new book and have been using our comprehension dogs to unpick vocabulary and to compare.

On Wednesday, we had a special treat as members of Bristol University visited us to introduce 'Lego Robotics'. We worked so well together to program our robots; some of us made our robots follow colour, make noises, change direction and even stop for a nearby obstruction! It gave us a great insight into engineering and was a fun and inspiring afternoon!

15.10.18 - 24.10.18 (Weeks 7 and 8)

To finish term 1, Soul class had lots of fun carrying out a science experiment and using equipment from the secondary school, working together with exciting tools (safely!) in forest school, and writing some incredible diaries for their progress writes! We also got to go to the Hippodrome to experience a performance by Malorie Blackman.

08.10.18 - 12.10.18 (Week 6)

It's been a very busy couple of weeks for Soul class with a Black History Month workshop, camp and then a week back at school with a library visit and a musical values assembly! We had an absolutely fantastic time at camp and the children were amazing; they were brave, supportive, resilient and most importantly, full of smiles! I hope you enjoyed keeping up with us through the photos in our Camp section!

This week, Soul Class have learnt about the Trojan War and were going to write a diary in the style of a Greek or Trojan soldier but we decided that we had such an exciting time at camp that we would write it about the day we went caving! Their ideas have been fantastic.

In maths, we have looked at addition and really thought about the importance of place value - lots of us have extended our learning and challenged ourselves to solve problems with missing digits!

We have been getting creative in art and have been making paper maché Greek pots using balloons which we will be decorating next week (those that haven't burst that is!)

We have already started to think about our class assembly next week and cannot wait to share all of our learning with you!

24.09.18 - 28.09.18 (Week 4)

Another fantastic week full of focused learning - well done, Soul Class! This week, we visited the agora, where we held our very own debate on whether children should be able to vote! After learning about Greek democracy, and the rules the Greeks created, we decided to take matters into our own hands and share our views in a Greek-style debate. Soul Class then planned out a balanced argument in which they showed an understanding for the opinion that they didn't necessarily agree with. I was very impressed with their maturity and also the fantastic reasoning they came up with!

In PHSE, we looked at what we need to learn and the right's children have. The children thought really hard about what is most important to them and reflected on their own responsibilities which impact their learning.

17.09.18 - 21.09.18 (Week 3)