The Chronicle

This week in Junior 6, we have been studying the novel Northern Lights as our core text.  We focused on the first chapter and the setting of this, making some comparisons with the Great Hall at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series.  We thought about the concept of daemons and how these can take the form of their master’s personality and their inner consciousness.  We researched different animals and chose one that we thought would be a good daemon for us, remembering that it had to have similar characteristics to us.  Because we are children, we can have several different daemons!  Our daemons included dolphins, foxes, monkeys, squirrels, cats, dogs and many more! 

We have some amazing mathematicians in Junior 5, one of whom came FIRST in the Primary Maths Challenge, undertaken by Mrs Lammas’s group last week, which is a fantastic achievement! Everyone did well with some other great top scorers. Maths, in general, is going swimmingly and all children are demonstrating their understanding and knowledge daily. Mental mathematics is improving rapidly – all Junior 5s complete a 3-minute maths test each lesson and we can all see improvements across the whole year group. Keep up the AMAZING effort!

This week, Junior 4 have been getting themselves in the festive spirit, designing and creating brilliantly beautiful baubles for our Christmas tree. We were amazed by their creativity! In English, the children have been working hard to vary their sentence openers, whilst describing a jewellery box fit for a Queen, with secret compartments. The children doubled their adjectives, alliterated their words and used ambitious vocabulary like intricate, glistening and elegantly, to help describe their box. They have also been working hard to practise their Advent service, which we are all excited to see very soon. Well done, everyone!

Our Kenyan journey continues in Junior 3 as the children completed their safari tour in class, looking at all the wonderful wildlife and scenery of the savannah and the rainforests. The pupils are exploring the climate and temperatures of an equatorial country and finding out just how lucky we are in the UK not to experience searing heat, lack of food and sparse water supplies. We have been busy writing a full story using all the English skills we have learned in the past few weeks, similes, alliteration, fronted adverbials and powerful verbs - we can’t wait to read them! In Science, Junior 3 have been investigating which materials are magnetic. They enjoyed predicting which of a wide range of objects and materials might be magnetic, before going on to test each one. Finally, we identified that only some metals are magnetic and we tested small discs of differing metals to find which these are. Being avid readers, we are currently very excited about the imminent refurbishment of our school library (which is being overhauled by Mrs Steeples), and the pupils are excited to continue their learning journey through their love of literature.

What an incredible week Junior 2 have had; it has certainly passed by in a whirl of activity and fun! On Monday, we received an email from the professor at the University of Warwick, whose dragon eggs we have been safely nurturing. She wanted to remind us that they needed to return to the laboratory on Friday and she would be picking them up, so that they could hatch safely. On Tuesday, we completed our field study trip to Kenilworth. We looked at the variety of uses of the buildings, shops and green spaces and showed how clever we were at spotting the different types of shops and houses. We even spotted a clock tower, doctors. library, hotel, gym and even a vets! Our wonderful mini-bus drivers kindly drove us past the castle on the way home to ensure we had seen all of the sights. We really were astounded by how many places we didn’t even know existed! On Wednesday, we made our class Advent calendar in our RE lesson and learnt about the significance of this special time of preparation. Thursday began with another email from the dragonologist who needed instructions for how to catch one of her escaped dragons. And finally, Friday was our much-awaited trip to Warwick Castle. We are really loving our learning in J2 and can’t wait to see what the next couple of weeks bring!

We finished looking at the artist Paul Klee this week and we have worked very carefully to develop our drawing, colouring and painting skills to create a number of pieces of artwork inspired by him, including a new display for the Art Room! In Geography after looking at why farmers keep animals and all the things we use them for, we moved onto looking at Arable farms and why it takes all year for farmers to grow crops and how this keeps them busy. Over in History we looked at how our clothing has changed over the years. We decided that our clothes are much more comfortable, and we would prefer to wear modern clothes to those worn in Victorian times because the colours are brighter and we can change them more often and not worry about keeping them clean for a whole week.

It’s been a jam-packed week in Reception. We are working very hard in our Nativity rehearsals, and we can’t wait to sing and perform it in a few weeks time! Using lots of manipulatives, we have explored one more and one less in Maths, and thoroughly enjoyed building Lego staircases to understand this concept. Using Google Earth to locate the USA, we learnt why Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, and the different foods they eat with their families and friends at this time. It was amazing to see the huge Thanksgiving parades in New York city, particularly the gigantic inflatables – the Elf on the Shelf inflatable was our favourite!