This half term, we will be learning about Ernest Shackleton and his expedition to the South Pole. To learn about a polar expedition and the things you might require, we took part in outdoor learning. Dotted around the outdoor classroom were cards with two items to choose between. The children had to decide which item they would take with them on an expedition and why.
This half term we have been reading the story ‘The Explorer’ by Katherine Rundell. It has been an inspiring book to our young writers and they have produced some amazing work.
They were disgusted to hear about the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest so wrote persuasive letters to the Brazilian Ambassador to encourage him to stop the clearing of the rainforest. We got so immersed in the story that the children wrote a descriptive setting piece about their own journey through the Amazon, concentrating on using their five senses. Finally, we ended the term on writing diamante poems about some of the animals we met in the story so far.
This morning, children from Reception and Y3 met to share their learning. Y3 children shared their non-chronological reports on the Ancient Egyptians, while Reception children shared their learning about Iceland and New Zealand.
Year 3 then sang their song ‘Amazing Egyptians’ to their buddies, along with the actions. A great time was had by all!
Back in the Autumn term, year 4 wrote some kennings poems, which we entered into a competition. Our kennings were about Roman Gladiators. Today, the published books arrived with our poems inside!
We had a fantastic time at Bookbugs and Dragon Tales bookshop this week, where some of our children in Reception and Year 2 got the opportunity to meet the author and illustrator of ‘Out of the Blue’ and do some fun activities. They also got to take part in a question and answer session and asked some brilliant questions. We all had a great time visiting this amazing bookshop!
Les Herissons (and all of Year 3) have loved learning about the Ancient Egyptians.
Look at these amazing non-chronological reports they have produced in writing!
They have so much knowledge and we are all so proud of them.
Year 4 have started the new term to an incredible beginning. We began the week by exploring our focus for this half term, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. In Writing, we have discovered figurative language such as alliteration, similes, metaphors and onomatopoeia. We have found examples of this in The Iron Man and created our own examples to write short poems about the Iron Man.
In Art, we explored sketching techniques and practiced hatching, contour hatching, cross hatching and smudging. Our final piece, is a chalk drawing of The Iron Man. See some examples of our work below!
Each term in Reception the children do a piece of ‘drawing into writing’. They draw a picture of something they have done in the holidays and then write about with the help of an adults. We have been really impressed at the children’s communication skills and also their use of their sounds to write.
This week we started to read the book Meerkat Mail. We met Sunny the Meerkat who lives in the Kalahari desert. The children found out about meerkats, where they live, what they eat and how they survive in the desert. We also received a post card from Sunny. Sunny told them about his habitat and the children wrote down some of the things they learnt from the postcard. We also found out about the Jewish Creation Story and about the importance of Shabbat, which is the Jewish day of rest.
All of this half term we have focused our learning around the storybook of ‘Lost and found’ by Oliver Jeffers. We have been creating story maps, fact files and even our own books based on what we can remember from the story. The children have worked really hard to memorize and recreate the story in their writing with a focus on the three parts of the story (beginning, middle and end).