Malala Yousafzai Class - October 2023

This week Malala Yousafzai have been learning about the Earth and the solar system.  The class has spent time researching about the Earth and the seven other planets in the solar system. The class has found out some fascinating facts about the time it takes for each planet to orbit the Sun once.

Whilst it only takes the Earth 365 days to complete one orbit, Neptune takes over 164 years to circle the Sun once. Amazing eh!

The class also learnt about the length of days on each planet. Again, the group learnt about how quickly or slowly planets rotated leading to some significant differences in the length of one day on each planet. The class found it fascinating that some planets have much longer or shorter days than we experience here in Ventnor, Planet Earth.

A day on Jupiter only lasts 10 Earth days, a day on Mercury is 1,408 hours long (that’s nearly 59 Earth days).

We thought that Christmas Day on Mercury would be brilliant because it would be nearly 60 days long, but then again the extreme heat and cold would spoil it somewhat!

The group have also been working hard on building understanding and resilience in their times tables work through our Maths Sense programme. Each day through this week, the children have been spending time practising their “square times tables”.

It has been really reassuring for many to see how well they have been doing and already being able to track their own progress. We will be moving onto the 4 and 5 times tables after the half term break.

In our Guided Reading work, we have reached an exciting chapter in our class book, Thief by Malorie Blackman. The book has led to numerous class discussions about how the author has created tension, distrust and threat through the story about a girl who falls forwards in time to meet her younger brother, who is now 47 years old!

The children have enjoyed discussing the various possible outcomes, who can be trusted, who is secretly passing on information to the “tyrant” and most importantly, how can the main character Lydia get back to her own time again! We’ll keep you posted!