This week, we have been getting into the festive spirit by taking part in lots of fun activities. We firstly used an app called keynote on our iPads to create Christmas jumper designs.

We then helped Mr Ash out as he had forgotten his Christmas jumper. We designed Christmas images to help transform his school fleece into a fully functioning Christmas jumper!

In writing, we finished off our shared writing using a film called ‘Alma’ as inspiration. We began planning our final write. To start with we held a silent debate looking at 5 strange items that Mr Ash brought in including: a trumpet, a spooky King Lear poster and a projector. We had some amazing ideas and the children produced some incredible pieces.

On Monday, we had a visit from Sam the sound man. We learnt so many amazing things about sound from how echoes work to ways we could make our own instruments. We all really enjoyed the session and it really helped deepen our Science learning for this half term. A couple of cool facts we learnt were: hard materials produce more echoes, there is no sound in space and the bigger the object the lower the sound it will make.

Every Friday, we have our library spot which allows us to enjoy our school’s fantastic library. We are going to be starting a weekly book club in that time – which will let us talk about a book we enjoy and recommend it to our friends.

This week, we had the pleasure of working with not one but two professional dance companies. On Monday, we were joined by the amazing Leeds based company Phoenix Dance. They showcased their skills and we even joined them in a collaborative piece. 

On Thursday, we were joined by a group of dancers from Mexico. We demonstrated our arts fortnight dance and they reciprocated by showcasing their own dance specifically choreographed for their UK visit.  

I was absolutely gutted that I missed the art celebration due to illness.

However, I did have the pleasure of seeing all the class grow in confidence and skill throughout the two week experience. It was lovely to return back to work on Monday to hear just how amazing the performance had been and how the children’s art work had wowed parents and staff alike. 

During our Art sessions, we learnt so many skills. Firstly, we learnt all about self portraits. Mrs Housam gave us some top tips (who knew our eyes were in the middle of our heads!) We used this to create our own iron man portraits ready for us to print. We created our tiles using polystyrene and we etched in our designs using pencils. Finally, we repeated our patterns onto our art work. Mrs Housam and I were both blown away by the quality of the artwork produced. 

In Writing, all the children impressed us with their amazing skills. We used our model text to help inspire our own story about a child’s adventure in a strange scrapyard. A special shout out goes to Sameer, Georgia S and Hattie – whose writing was made into their own storybook using Gemini Storybook. If you managed to take a picture of your child’s writing, you too could make their story into an illustrated masterpiece. 

Finally, the dance came together over the course of the fortnight. It was a real pleasure to see the children’s professionalism and confidence as they danced to one of my favourite songs. 

Wow – what an amazing week we have had!

We started the week by learning our model text called the wasteland. We then undertake a number of different writing activities and we collaborated extremely well with our talk partners. We also looked at the poem Silver by Walter De La Mer. We discovered that the poem is in iambic pentameter which means it works really well with hip hop music. We really enjoyed warming up by creating our own rap lines. 

On Tuesday, Mrs Fox worked with us to begin choreographing a dance performance. Initially, we struggled to grasp some of the more complex dance movements but following some practice we ended this week’s dance lessons much more confident. In Art, we drew figures using wooden statues. We learnt all about the importance of proportion and used this knowledge to create our own ‘Iron Man’ drawing on black card.  I think you will agree they are incredible!

On Thursday, we looked at self portraits in preparation for our next art piece. We also had the pleasure of cooking with Mrs Elliott. We made tortilla pizzas and it was lovely to see the smiling faces of the children as they devoured their culinary creations. Next week, our art celebration will take place on Friday 14th November at 1:30pm. 

Our Design and Technology sessions ended with us all painting our shields with a base colour and then adding our patterns using chalk pens. I was really impressed with the skill each child showed and the overall finished products. 

During October, we celebrated Black History Month. We discussed the reasons why it is such an important part of our learning as well as gaining an understanding of when and why it was originally created. We looked at a number of people who have helped shape British history some of which we already knew.

We started the week by taking part in a Roman workshop led by master storyteller Matthew Bellwood. We acted out different Roman scenes from battling in the amphitheatres to then taking a walk down a Roman high street. The experience really helped consolidate a lot of our previous learning as well as teaching us so many intriguing facts. 

This week, we have focused a lot of our time and energy into making Celtic shields. We learnt that the Celts were a group of tribes that lived across northern Europe and Britain. We started the week by looking at different Celt shields and talked about the difference between them and Roman shields. We then created a design drawing from our inspiration. We noticed that some of our designs were a little too intricate so we had a go at redesigning our shields in preparation for building them. 

The building stage saw us draw out the outline of our shields and cut them out using scissors. We then created shield bosses (the middle part of a shield) by stacking cardboard and glueing it on – which made a relief. Next week, we will complete the painting of our shields.