The Chronicle

Junior 6 have been working incredibly hard this week to ensure a full understanding of all aspects of transforming shapes, in their continuing revision and preparations for examinations.  They have been learning how to translate shapes in different directions, reflect shapes across mirror lines and through horizontal and vertical axes and rotate shapes round a point or vertex.  They have also looked at how to relay the position of a shape by using coordinates and have used a four-quadrant grid to do this. 

Some of the children participated in the Primary Maths Challenge, while others had fun thinking about the properties of 2D and 3D shapes – we thought of humorous ways to remember the different triangles and even learned the name of an 11-sided shape!

Our Junior 5s have had a super week of learning. In Maths, we have looked at types of number from factors through to multiples – we are trying to master mathematical vocabulary as it helps us understand written and oral word problems and instructions! We have all interviewed a family member so we can write a biography about them. Wow, we have certainly learned lots about their lives.

In sports, we have been enjoying Winter Sports. Our girls have been honing their netball and hockey skills and our boys their football and rugby. We believe that School Games is now more important than ever as a way to help the children to resocialise and improve their physical and emotional wellbeing.

This week in J4B, we have really focused on Kindness.

It was World Kindness Day on Friday 13 November and we wrote some lovely notes to teachers around school. J4B have been noticing all of the kind actions and words that we use and acknowledging these and placing them on our wow work board. We found the 'ripple-effect' of doing this quite powerful and it was heart-warming to see and hear the kind things that we do and say to each other.

This theme has continued into Anti-Bullying Week and we have made a new display entitled 'Hanging Bullying Out To Dry'. We created our own odd socks and hung them on our washing line. We celebrate differences and as Isaiah 64:8 says, 'Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.' We think our socks look amazing and they all contain some important messages about how to deal with bullying. 

Year 4 have been working hard on alphabetical order in their VR lessons. We know that we have to 'Master' this to help us with our VR work in Year 5. We can even put words in alphabetical order to the fifth letter! 

Bossy verbs, time adverbials, preposition and exciting introductions. These are just some of the skills that Junior 3 have been practising and demonstrating over the past week. Wrapping up our topic, both classes completed their hilarious instructions for How to Wash a '…….'. Some even chose to tell us how to wash a sabre tooth tiger but we weren’t sure whether it would pass the classroom risk assessment.

We are so proud of all the children, for showing such a wonderful attitude towards improving their writing. 

In Science the children learned the various types of joints and then created their own paper skull, to show the movement of a hinge joint, don't they all look amazing in the photos!

This week we have been looking at the famous artist Frida Kahlo, who is considered one of Mexico’s greatest artists, she is known for her painting of self-portraits in bright, vibrant colours. She began painting after a terrible bus accident which left her in a full body cast and totally bedridden for over three months.

We also learned that Frida contracted Polio when she was only six years old; this meant that she had one leg much shorter than the other causing her to have a complex about how she looked. Frida never drew or painted her legs but rather covered them in bright, colourful skirts. We really enjoyed exploring her work and studying the techniques she used to create her vibrant pictures.

We hope you like our lovely artwork, we very much enjoyed creating them.

Junior 1 have continued to amaze and inspire us this week with their hard work and enthusiasm for learning. Their joy of writing has continued and it is has been wonderful to see everyone filling their writing books with such big smiles on their faces. Our English focus has been to change words into plurals and also to identify and write our own rhymes. The perfect books for these elements have been ‘Oi Frog’ and ‘Oi Dog’ which have proven to be extremely popular. The children loved reading both stories and then moving on to inventing their own funny rhymes.

Our Maths lessons have all been as popular, with the children sorting, describing and investigating 3D shapes. They have thoroughly enjoyed the practical nature of these mathematical concepts. Finally, our Science lessons have inspired the children to observe the weather more closely and this week we took our individual rain gauges inside to analyse the rain fall over the last week.

What a perfect week to measure the rain! 

It has been another fun-filled week in Reception, as we embraced our topic of Diwali!

Throughout the week we have enjoyed learning more about this special celebration which is also known as the festival of light. Not only did we read the story of Rama and Sita, we also made masks and acted out the story too. We used our senses of sight, smell and taste as we tried some traditional Indian foods and thoroughly enjoyed our visit from Mrs Verma, who brought us each a bangle as a gift and showed us pictures of her own Diwali celebrations. Using rice, we made rangoli patterns and we discovered that we absolutely love the smell of the incense used in Diwali prayers.

Why not ask us to tell you what we know about Diwali?