This afternoon, the children have been designing the twenty frames for their Suffragette flickbooks, considering slight movements between each frame and simple drawings that are easy to repeat. Inspired by the propaganda posters of the time, the children have created stories portraying the Suffragettes as ugly or being silenced by padlocks! Each is very unique and we are excited to create the final outcome!
Two months ago, Sophie asked me if we could work together to get our green Blue Peter badge. We, of course, jumped at this opportunity! In order to become climate heroes, we planted some bee friendly flowers, made posters to share how to save our oceans, wrote a balanced argument about deforestation in the Amazon rainforest AND wrote acrostic poems about nature.
Today, our badges arrived!
Year 6 has been getting stuck into production rehearsals and the whole year group has made us proud by giving it their all and demonstrating their true spirit that 'the show must go on!' In between rehearsals, we have been doing more rehearsing...of our performance poetry...and we cannot wait to perform our poems next week. We have also been getting stuck into our class novel, "Monster Calls", exploring new vocabulary and themes related to the book. These lessons have stimulated some really interesting discussions in class and have proved a springboard to many deeper questions. In maths, we set up a 'bakery', bringing together many of the areas of maths that we have studied this year to scale up recipes, to calculate profits and to design packaging. However, not all of us were convinced that saving a few pence on buying butter was worth a trip to a different supermarket... Perhaps the highlight of the last fortnight was learning about famous Greeks. So far we have explored the inventions of Archimedes, studied the maths of Pythagoras and debated using the questioning techniques of Socrates! The Ancient Greeks were certainly a brilliant bunch...if a little quirky!!!!
Year 4 have had an interesting week with home learning! We didn’t think we would be having a week off but we all worked so hard to produce some excellent work!
We began a new unit in writing, working on producing an information leaflet on Antarctica. Each day, we focused on writing about a different area… location, animals, history and glow all warming. The children all worked so hard and produced some outstanding work!
Just before we started home learning, Year 4 were studying a poetry unit from Jane Considine. We started off by analysing a poem called ‘The River’ looking at its shape and the components that made up each stanza. We then had the opportunity to write our own ‘The River’ poem. The children really worked on linking the noun used to personify the river and the adjectives to describe it.
Today, we have begun a new unit based on balanced arguments looking at the for and against opinions to whether TV is good for children. We produced a toolkit which we will use when writing our own balanced argument over the next two weeks looking at whether graffiti is art or crime.
Year 1 have had a super busy two weeks! We have been practising our poem for the Poetry Slam, learning about 3d shapes in Maths and have spent our PE lessons preparing for Sports' Day. We have been practising skills like javelin throwing, jumping over hurdles, bean bag throwing and dribbling a ball with a tennis bat. We've had lots of fun learning some new skills!
In Maths, the children have really enjoyed learning the properties of the 3d shapes as well. We have been exploring what the shapes feel like and have experimented with sorting and building with the shapes.
As well as all this, the children have wowed all the Year 1 team with their amazing artistic work. We have been looking at colour mixing and the children completed their very own colour wheel, where we discussed primary and secondary colours. We then looked at the artist Rachael Bennett and saw how her painting imitates the seascape. We tried to mix paints to make a sea effect using tints and shades and became artists ourselves!
Please enjoy Cassatt's Rendition of 'Don't Feed the Animals' by Robert Hull.
Please click the link below:
A password for the video will be sent out via school comms.
Miss Lawrence, Mrs Williams and Mrs Erdogan were so proud of all the children for learning such a tricky poem. We were particularly impressed with their use of voice and understanding of new vocabulary. You were our winners Cassatt!!
Please enjoy Degas' Rendition of 'Oh Dear!' By Michael Rosen
Please click the link below:
https://vimeo.com/568330074
A password for the video will be sent out via school comms.
It was so good we won 2nd place! Well done Degas you were superb and it really was the best performance you have ever done of this fantastic poem!
The children in Matisse and Riley class impressed us yet again last week, when they were required to isolate and work from home for a week. As always, we were greeted with positive and smiling faces over Google Classroom. Despite it being a challenging week, they all worked extremely hard, showing resilience and flexibility. We are so proud of them all.
Here's what we've been up to....
As historians, we've been further exploring why the Romans invaded Britain and whether we think the Romans were clever or criminal by their use of slaves. We've also been studying the picture book, Escape from Pompeii to learn more about the history of Italy.
As petrologists, we have been learning more about rocks. We set up an experiment to investigate which rock would be best suited to replace our roof at Windhill21: granite, chalk or slate? To test the permeability of the rocks we used a pipette to drop water onto each rock and observed what happened. We discussed how we could make it a fair test and took turns to read the instructions, take the measurements and record the results. We discovered that chalk was permeable so would not be a good material for a roof. Slate on the other hand was largely impermeable.
Next, we performed a scratch test on our rock samples to test the durability of them. We analysed the results and concluded that slate would be the best replacement for our roof!
In English, we've been writing our own traditional story based on the tale, The King of the Fishes. The stories were packed full of creativity and ambitious vocabulary!
In music, we had a go at learning and performing some tricky body percussion rhythms including 'Boom Snap Clap' and the Mambo Cup Rhythm. It took a lot of practice and patience, but we persevered!
What an exciting day we had in Year 2! We rehearsed our poems, making sure we projected our voices and performed our actions in unison. This afternoon we went to the hall to perform in front of the judges, Mrs Pyne and Mrs Moore. We were filled with excitement and nerves! Both classes performed amazingly and our teachers were very proud of us. We then waited with trepidation for the results of the competition... Kusama were the Key Stage 1 winners! We celebrated both classes' achievement. Well done, Kusama!
This week has been full of lots of fun and exciting different activities in nursery. We started the week on Monday by reading the story 'The Tiger Who Came To Tea' by Judith Kerr. We then did some beautiful tiger paintings with great tiger stripes. Outside in the water tray there was some real lemons and oranges to play with ,which we squeezed and poured to make lemon and orange juice. The next day real fruit tea was added to the water tray and smelt delicious and made the tea party even more exciting and real.
We have had a very productive week this week in year 5. In our reading lessons, we have been looking at newspapers as the source for our comprehension questions - the children were especially excited to read about the Euros. We have started our non-chronological reports all about penguins and we have written about the extreme climates and temperatures that the penguins have to battle through to survive. In maths, the children revisited fractions and have overcome the initial barrier that “fractions are hard” and this has enabled us to explore adding, subtracting, multiplying and fraction word problems! In our PSHE lesson, we discussed gender stereotypes and how we should challenge these stereotypes to ensure everyone has equal opportunities and rights.
