This afternoon, the children were introduced to their 8 week programme, Mini Police. We were visited by a local PCSO who informed the children of her role and outlined the aims of this new and exciting programme. The children were also asked what makes a good Mini Police Officer. They even were allocated their own uniforms!
This week, the children have been writing about their journey into a secret garden, thinking all the time about mood and atmosphere. Today, Year 5 explored inside the secret garden to inspire the planning of their next paragraph.
This week in Reception we have been looking at our class artists: Degas and Cassatt.
We looked at a specific piece of art such as 'Race Horses' by Edgar Degas and looked at the features of the painting.
Our classroom has been transformed... using images and eerie music the children write their journey to the secret garden. The children are trying to include all of the features from our suspense toolkit, including powerful verbs and prepositional phrases.
For Homework last week, the children went away to research information to answer their scientific questions they came up with as a group. The posters the children made were creative and full of lots of facts from their homework. All children spoke clearly and professionally when presenting with their group! We all definitely learnt a lot!
This week our immersion room has been transformed into a secret, forbidden garden. We will be creating a piece of descriptive writing to build suspense about this garden. Year 4 have been generating vocabulary and ideas from their immersion room visit and we are exited to get writing!
In Reception, we have been building our vocabulary.
After being woken up by a mysterious noise, the children in Reception decided to find out what was going on up in the loft! We had to make sure that we were very quiet so that we didn't wake anyone else up!
"We need to creep!"
"We have to tip-toe!"
"We can't make a sound!"
"Quietly! Carefully!"
Together, we opened the chest to find lots of different uniforms, some old and some that we recognised. We even uncovered an incredibly special medal belonging to Mrs Price's mummy for her services with St John's Ambulance! Along with police officer jackets, a train driver's hat, a nurse's tabard and a postal worker's parcel, we discovered that these were the belongings of people who help us!
We are looking forward to learning more about our People Who Help Us topic.
How do circuits work?
Moore class are now experts on this subject as we actually became a circuit in our last science lesson! One person became the bulb, one the battery (cell) and the others are the joining wires. We passed electrons (stones) around the circuit from the battery and the bulb lit up.
When the battery had no charge the electrons couldn’t flow so the bulb didn’t light up. When the wire became disconnected and we broke the circuit, the bulb couldn’t light up!
What an exciting start to the term Year 1 have had!
We had a very special visit from Spiky the hedgehog! Spiky had become lost and hid in Mrs Kemmish's shed. Thank goodness she found him and is now looking after him for a while until he is big enough to live in his proper home. We suggested that he should live in a forest and drew pictures of what forests look like. We have also been amazing artists and carefully drew pictures of hedgehogs with special art pencils.
We are really enjoying learning all about forest and did a brilliant scavenger hunt, looking for lots of different things that we might find there.
In maths we have been practising lots of counting, recognising numbers quickly by looking at their patterns (e.g. like the spots on a dice) and making numbers in different ways.
It has been a delight to welcome back Year 3 to school after such a long time away. We have been so impressed with how sensibly they have adjusted back into school life and how eager they have been to embrace all the exciting topics we will be learning about this term.
Riley and Matisse Class have both been exploring the life and works of their class artist, and have created some colourful artwork displays in the artists' styles.
In English, the children have wowed us with their suspense writing skills. To inspire their creativity, we used the immersion room to create an eerie attic, complete with music, sound effects and dusty props covered with cobwebs. From this, the children generated an amazing bank of vocabulary and sentence starters to describe the attic. We used drama to bring the story to life, creeping out of bed and up the creaky ladder into the dark, abandoned attic. Who knows what secrets will be discovered?
In History, the children have been learning about the Ancient Egyptians and investigating our big question... Were they brilliant or brutal? They were particularly mesmerised about the mummification process... Not for the faint hearted!
In PSHE, we've been discussing the children's feelings about lockdown, and how it's okay to experience different feelings and emotions. We read the story 'Lucy's Blue Day', by Christopher Duke, where Lucy's hair changes colour depending on her emotions. We've also been exploring the idea of risk and how we can navigate risky or dangerous situations.
In Maths, we have been focussing on place value, using Dienes to represent ones, tens and hundreds. We've also been exploring open ended maths problems, such as how many 3 digit numbers you can make from a four digit number such as 4682?
This has been nursery’s first full week at Windhill21 and we
have all had a busy week settling in and adjusting to the new routines. The
children have done brilliantly considering this has been the first time for
some that they have been left ever due to the covid situation. Many of the
children have enjoyed playing in our role play area which is a baby clinic looking
after the babies and getting them dressed.
The
children have learnt that our nursery is called ‘Potter Class’ and we have
enjoyed sharing the Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle soft toys with our friends
and listening to the stories, as well as colouring in a picture of Peter
Rabbit.
Outside we have been in our nursery bubble riding on the scooters and climbing on the apparatus and enjoying making tea and cake in the mud kitchen.
Year 4 have enjoyed settling back into school after a long 5 months! We have packed a lot in over the last two weeks including art, topic, drama and some very exciting writing opportunities. Both classes focused on their class artist during the first few days of school - Moore class made sculptures in the style of Henry Moore.
In topic, Year 4 have started to investigate whether London was a great place to live during the Victorian times. We have looked at a timeline of events that took place in London’s history’s and are started to delve deeper into the main inventions and acts that shaped the Victorian Era. Our new topic words this week are: reign and era.
