The Chronicle

During French this term, we have been learning how to accurately name and pronounce items in our school pencil cases, subjects that we study, the time of day and what our likes and dislikes are.

We are hoping to conduct a survey, asking each other (in French of course!) about our favourite subjects. This week we have sent a letter to our pen-pals in France and look forward to receiving a reply.

Another great week of learning!

Our forces topic continues to be investigative, with the use of Newton Meters to measure force and vehicles travelling down ramps, with pupils ably predicting and measuring the friction created by various floor surfaces around the school.

We commemorated Remembrance Day with a wonderful whole school assembly and J5R relished listening to our Caretaker Michael Luis, who proudly filled them in on his service in the military and the medals he had been awarded. In addition, this topic has inspired the pupils to create felt poppies in their Art lessons and Alfred penned a fabulous poem entitled 'Poppies' for his English homework.

The J5’s have also worked enthusiastically whilst creating an array of poetry and performing these to their peers. 

Year 4 have been writing their SuperGran/Grandad stories this week to reflect the superhero qualities we have been looking at this Vocations fortnight: kindness, humbleness, modesty and helpfulness. Our elderly superheroes certainly gave staff a big surprise at their sudden agility, acrobatics, ability and general heroics helping members of the public out of sticky situations. Zimmer frames became cages, walking sticks shot lasers, antique earrings frisbeed through the air and handbags were the ultimate weapon against those pesky villains!

The children have not been content using everyday words and have been using thesauruses to improve their vocabulary to include words that they’ve never used before such as: antiquated, hefty, bitter, hobbling, suspiciously, cobbled, haggard and lumbering.

We have a super class of budding authors!

This week, Junior 3 spent a wonderful morning immersing themselves in their Stone Age topic in the Forest School area. We worked together to build some amazing shelters and also tried our hand at fashioning stone-age weapons such as spears, bows and arrows and other simple tools.

We enjoyed creating paintings on ‘animal hide’ and recording messages for each other using symbols made from sticks, stones, shells and leaves.

A healthy dose of fresh air certainly helped our learning and we were all quite exhausted by home time! Thankfully, we all have lovely modern warm homes to snuggle up in so we didn’t need to rely on our handmade shelters.

This week we have celebrated Diwali. We had fun trying on a variety of outfits with sequins and sparkles enjoyed by all! The true meaning of Diwali is the 'celebration of light', 'making a fresh start', and 'new beginnings'. Many people consider that Diwali marks the start of their new year, enabling them to make plans for a new start, a little like New Year's resolutions. We looked at the importance of having the house cleaned just before Diwali and we had fun learning all about this wonderful festival. 

Did you know, Diwali literally means a row of lights? We learned about the story of Rama and Sita and how lights play such an important role in this festival.

Happy Diwali to you all.

Junior 1 have finally finished a whole year group piece of art work based on the topic of ‘Homes’. We spent a long time collecting cardboard boxes, turning them inside out and decorating them to look like houses. They were then stuck onto a display so they look like houses on a hillside – quite remarkable don’t you think?

In Science this week we have been looking closely at the weather, in particular the symbols used in a weather forecast. Each class has made rain gauges and put them outside to see how much rain falls over the next week. Fingers crossed for rainy and stormy days so we can have some interesting results to plot onto our bar charts next week!

Our theme in Reception this week has been Remembrance Day and the importance of remembering all those who have given their lives to enable us to live in peace.

We started the week by enjoying a presentation by Mr Luis, our caretakeer. Mr Luis has served in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and the children thoroughly enjoyed quizzing him on his military service with the RAF. We learnt how to stand to attention, do a proper salute and we saw some impressive medals too! Following on from this, we learnt about the significance of wearing a poppy at this time of year and made our own class wreath for the classroom door.

We also enjoyed learning and reciting a poppy poem, painted poppy pictures and listened to the Last Post.

You can watch us reciting our poem here: https://vimeo.com/478854494/f434e359d6

What a busy and engaging week we have enjoyed!