What we have been up to over the first couple of weeks since Christmas!

Date: 31st Jan 2017 @ 11:03pm

We have started our new topic footsteps and have set up our new role play area. The Year3/4 areas are based on habitats and our's is a garden and minibeast habitat (rather on the lines of honey I shrunk the kids, with lots of the props oversized!). It links rather nicely with our science topic for the term which is plants, lifecycles and food chains. The children have lots of books, poetry, treasure hunts and educational games in the area to help encourage them to learn all about the topic and consolidate what we learn in class.

In literacy we are studying Winter's Child and have been looking at some of the beautiful imagery, noun phrases and prepositions. Yesterday we composed stanzas of poetry based on the key themes from the book and some children composed complete poems on their own winter dreams. Today we have focused on describing the key characters and finding quotes to support their chosen characteristics.

As for science, we have been looking at the key parts of a flowering plant and their functions, Moreover the children have been looking at what plants need to survive and have designed their own investigations to test whether their hypotheses are correct. We therefore have numerous pots of seeds planted, which we will observe growing under a variety of conditions (including some which have been zapped and overheated in a microwave oven!!!).

RE has been really enjoyable. We have been looking at the Kingdom of God and how we can enter it, how we should live our lives as Jesus taught us and what distractions may come along in life to challenge our faith. We have studied a number of parables (The sower and the seed, the yeast, the mustard seed and the rich man who wanted to enter the Kingdom of God). The children have done this through pictures, drama and even baking bread.

The children may also have asked you if they can spend half an hour to an hour playing flappy birds on their computer! Yes this was at my request as we have been trying to decompose the program and then compose simple alogrithms that would have been used to make the program work! I think they all particularly loved this lesson... I wonder why!  

In art we have been making origami flowers and snowflakes and practicing our folding and cutting skills, We have also been doing observational drawings of both RHS flowers, bulbs and hyacinths at various stages and insects. We have studied Levon Bliss' microsculpture and have used his close up images of insects to inspire our observational sketches. We have created colour paletes and looked at blending pencil crayons to create the colours we need. Next we will progress onto acrylics using our sketches to produce some larger abstract pieces.

You may also have heard about our Chinese New Year celebrations, where we rotated round the classes and did music, wrote fortune cookies, tried Chinese food, learnt about our Chinese horoscope, animal and characteristics, made and decorated lanterns and did some Chinese New Year art in the style of Jackson Pollock.

All in all its been such a fun packed few weeks, its hard to believe Christmas wasn't that long ago!