Wow! What a day we have had creating the structures for our Anderson Shelters! The children have learnt many skills today including, using a hacksaw and bench hook, gluing triangle corners for a join and creating tabs to stick our front and end pieces to the main structure. The children were really enthused by today’s learning and are excited for the next stage... decorating!!!
This week year 4 have started a new writing unit about the Iron Man. This started with us discovering that the Iron Man had been to visit the school playground in the night! He left a strange chalk outline of where he had laid down. Kerys worked out it was 18 people long!
We have been exploring lots of different things this week in year 5 including testing out and experimenting with different materials to improve a parachute. We then put these to the test with our egg-cellent passengers. We have taken the role of Cameron this week from Pig Heart Boy and have started our diary entries to explore his thoughts and emotions at this point in the story. To really help us explore his true emotions, we used the drama hot seating technique. Congratulations to everyone in year 5 who also attended the tag rugby competition.
Year 6 have had another successful week of learning - the children are impressing us hugely with their hard work and enthusiastic attitudes in all they do!
In writing, we have built on our visit to the Bishop's Stortford War Memorial, and written a diary entry from the perspective of a soldier in World War I. The children have shown such empathy and a true ability to put themselves in the shoes of the young men who fought such a hard fight - our local history learning has really brought the topic alive for them. Reading diary entries from soldiers they now feel they 'know' has produced some moving, thoughtful and incredibly well written pieces of work.
We are also linking our art lessons to our WWI and science topics - and have begun to explore the concept of light and shadow. Careful sketching and new techniques under our belts will ultimately lead to sketching artefacts from the early 1900's. We look forward to sharing the end results with you!
RE saw us visit what it means to be a Humanist - and how the 'Golden Rule' of treating people as you, yourself, would like to be treated lies at the heart of the Humanist ideology. We were interested to learn how this rule also appears in almost every religion - and how, religious or not, applying it to our daily life can really help us all.
In French, the children have begun to explore the concept of likes and dislikes - and are forming complex sentences with real aplomb! We certainly have a year group who have both linguistic flair -and a lot of passion for discussion!
The children continue to be drawn into our reading text for the half term 'Holes' by Louis Sachar, and have been learning how to form character impressions founded on evidence. There has also been a large flurry of activity to discover Sachar's other novels...and non fiction books on everything Texas! From desert life to tornadoes!
Well done to the children on yet another fantastic week - and we look forward to sharing more with you soon.
We have had another busy 2 weeks in nursery.
The children have been practicing their pre-writing skills. We did this by reading the interactive story “Let’s Play” and exploring with the children different ways to draw a line. The book follows the adventures of a yellow dot and all the imaginative ways it makes lines. The children then had their own piece of paper to re-create some of the shapes and lines from the book. This is a very important pre-writing skill and if coupled with an appropriate tripod pencil grip will help your child when learning to form letters.
In Maths, we have been looking at making repeating patterns. Again, we used a story, “Curly the Caterpillar” to help us understand what a repeating pattern is. To help reinforce this concept the children made some lovely colourful pasta necklaces with a ABAB pattern. This activity also had the added fine motor skill benefit of threading.
We have been looking at the colour blue by having a ‘blue object’ hunt around the classroom to find objects that are coloured blue. We read the books, The Blue Balloon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOSccQ6rMzs) and the Blue Penguin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYKdcDpS3G0).
The week before last we looked at the colour red and linked this with learning about Remembrance Day and why we wear poppies.
We have also started practicing songs for our Nursery Nativity! Look out for further information about this exciting event.
Have a great week!
The Nursery Team.
In Year One we have started our new Design and Technology topic: Making smoothies!
First we discussed Harold's lunch box and how he needed something healthy to add to it. The children came up with the brilliant idea of adding a smoothie. We looked at 3 smoothies which Mrs Smith had bought and looked closely at the packaging and their ingredients.
We taste tested these smoothies, giving them a rating out of 10 as well as saying whether we did or did not like these smoothies.
Next we talked about forest fruits and learnt about foraging for fruit! We learnt about the type of fruits that you can forage. We tasted some shop bought fruits to decide whether or not we wanted to include these in our smoothies. The children then chose 2 or 3 fruits to add to their smoothies when they make them.
Over the last few weeks, Attenborough and Greta Class have been busy rehearsing for their production of Fire Fire, which will bring all their learning about the Great Fire of London to life in a memorable event. We have been so impressed with how well the children have learnt their lines of dialogue and lyrics in only a short period of time. They are rehearsing with confidence and flair and they are very excited to perform it next week!
English:
In our English lessons, we've been writing instructions on how to wash a pet rat. We looked at pictures and videos to learn about what rats look like and how they move and we used drama to imagine the steps that we would take to wash our rat. We created a class plan and thought about the language we would need to use.
Maths
This week in maths we have had a great time exploring angles and lines. We used geostrips to identify right angles around the room and how angles bigger than a right angle are called obtuse; whilst angles smaller than a right angle are called acute.
Science
This week in science we have started our new unit looking at forces and magnets. We explored the forces that push, pull and twist an object and how we can effect the motion of an object. To do this we used a variety of different objects and manipulated them in many different ways.
