I hope you’ve enjoyed our first lovely Spring days recently, they’ve probably been hotter than most of our Summer will be so make the most of the sunshine!

Much of our update this week is from Class 5 as they have been extremely busy in Miss Foxcroft’s absence. Mrs Young has been doing some fantastic learning with them and has a report of their progress over the last fortnight..

This week we have been really busy. In Literacy we learnt about different kinds of sentences and how to recognise them in writing. At the end of the week we used a fun tool called sentence pockets to check our understanding of the four types of sentences. We found some of the terms quite difficult to remember but once Mrs Young gave away the first letter we remembered them. Our favourite types of sentences were commands – I wonder why!!

In Maths we learnt about the value of numbers and how to recognise them using terms ‘greater than’, ‘less than’ and ‘equal to’. Our lovely Alex the Alligator and his snapping jaws helped us a lot. We now remember that he loves chomping on bigger numbers and turns his back to the smallest..

In RE we talked about rites of passage and how much they meant to us. We mentioned that birthdays..

..seeing our brothers and sisters..

..coming to England..

..and moving homes..

..were life changing experiences which we all valued a lot. We remembered ours on leaves and made our own Class 5 Tree of Life..

In PSHE we talked about kind and unkind words and compared them to cotton wool and sandpaper..

We also used toothpaste and carried out an experiment to see how easy it is to squeeze the paste out of the tube, but how hard it was to put it back in..

We said that it was the same with our words. Once we say something unkind it is out there and we can’t take it back. However, words like ‘Sorry’ or ‘I did not mean to hurt you’ can help to fix things and give us a fresh start!

We then made our own toothpaste words..

Last week in Science we learnt about a selection of light sources including the sun and identified some of the uses of light in the environment. We went round the school and tried to find all the things which could give us light. We also made the Sun out of paper plates and decorated it with some yellow and orange tissue paper..

We finished in Maths by using our knowledge of fractions to design pizzas with our choice of toppings…sadly they were only paper ones so as you can all imagine, it made us really hungry..

In Science our new topic is Nocturnal Animals. As part of it we had to learn why we have day and night. Tyreece has been a real star as he remembered how day and night happens and could explain it to the whole class using the globe with Harry acting as the Sun..

We have also learnt that looking directly at the Sun is very dangerous so we decided to design a pair of sunglasses to protect our eyes from the Sun – still remembering that we cannot gaze at the Sun for too long..

In Maths we have revised our knowledge of fractions. We tried to make halves and quarters of a shape by playing The Fraction Boogie game. Each of us needed one piece of newspaper. We then placed the piece of newspaper out as a ‘whole piece’. Our teacher played some fun dancing music so that we could dance along on our pieces of newspaper..

When the music stopped, we had to pick up our piece of paper and fold it in half..

We then started dancing on half of the newspaper..

Again, the music stopped and we had to fold the piece of paper so that they we were dancing on only one quarter. It was great fun and we absolutely loved it! In the next Maths lesson we had to identify ¼ , ½, ¾ and 1 whole of various shapes and a quantity. We played a matching fractions card game..

..and body fractions where our teacher called out an instruction such as ‘1/2 of 8’ and we had to choose how to display it, e.g. holding up 2 hands and 2 feet, etc..

In our History lesson we have learnt about early writing systems and that ancient Egyptians created one of the first writing systems, using hieroglyphs. We also tried creating our own hieroglyphs to represent some words..

Szymon has worked really hard and got a classroom achievement award for his hard work in lessons..

He chose to be my assistant for the day as his reward and proved to be extremely helpful!

WOW!! Class 5, you certainly have been working very hard – thank you, Mrs Young!

Class 1 have made some wonderful items during their DT lessons this year and the trend continues! They are going to be designing and making some cushion covers but before they can do that, we had to teach them how to sew. That’s quite a challenge with five 11 year old boys, let me tell you! So far, they have mastered a running stitch, a backstitch and the zig-zag. Leo is showing off his work here..

Levi is our secret sewing weapon and has already progressed to the chain stitch – I think it’s all that fishing and tying knots in lines that’s helping him to have the necessary patience!

In Class 6, Spring has finally sprung! There have been carrying on with their learning about the farm and made an array of animals that are displayed on their wall..

They look great! They have also been around school doing surveys on farm animals and making tables of their results, as well as finding out the correct names for baby animals..

They’ve also made the best of the weather and been learning outside wherever possible – Luke really enjoyed reading in the sunshine with Miss Fell and they’ve all enjoyed playing in the sand that Miss Cubach organised for them..

You may remember I shared a design that Kyle had made for Class 3’s Roman Mosaic? Well, here is the finished article being shown off by Kyle and Xavier..

Doesn’t it look amazing?! All the boys joined in with cut off pieces of wood and worked really carefully to create the finished masterpiece which is now proudly displayed in the classroom..

They have been writing about what it must have been like to have lived in the Roman times and here you can see the work Kyle came to show me, a very detailed diary entry..

 

My final word is about the new craze of fidget spinners and I’m pleased to say that unlike most other schools, we haven’t banned them….yet! On a serious note, these spinners are being marketed as something that aids concentration and allows children to focus but like most other schools we have found that whilst they are very therapeutic and relaxing, they don’t aid concentration in the classroom and in fact just distract everyone. However, they are a fun toy which the children are all obsessed with so we have decided to embrace them instead. All the children and I agreed in one of our assemblies that they need to be out of sight during learning times but can go out with them at playtimes. If any individual children persist in breaking our agreement, then they will lose that privilege and will not be allowed to bring theirs into school. Thankfully, that’s not happened yet. I believe strongly that the children need to be allowed to take responsibility for these things and they have responded to that in a sensible way. They have also been teaching us grown-ups some tricks with them at playtimes as you can see..

Have a lovely weekend,

Toni Thomason
Head of School

You can find our all blog entries here

Click here to read this week’s blog from Graham