The Chronicle

In Junior 6 this week, we have been celebrating British Science Week. We looked at the many different topics within STEM that can be linked with BSW theme of ‘growth’. We then looked to link the theme of ‘growth’ to our current topic of light. The children have explored how shadows grow and shrink depending on where the light source is in relation to the object. They investigated how big they could make their shadows and what they needed to do with the position of the light source in order to achieve this. They then tried to put together a strategy for shadow tig to see if they could minimise their shadow length in order to not get caught!

On Thursday, our Junior 5 pupils became the terrific Tudors and immersed themselves fully in a fun-packed, fantastic day learning about ‘all things Tudor’! The day started when Sir Patrick, the Tudor Leader, invited the children into his Great Hall. He gathered them on the floor and introduced all the wonderful activities, such as candle making, soap making, embroidery and scent-bag making. During the afternoon, the Great Hall became a banquet with entertainment with all the children performing in groups. We had dancers, jesters and singers, to name but a few. I think we would all agree that it was a tremendous experience. We are very grateful to the fantastic parent helpers who gave of their time willingly.

Junior 4 have had a wonderful week of excitement investigating the 'Growth' theme of British Science Week, and whether pupils with the longest feet, jump the furthest. There’s been lots of theorising, inquiry, measuring, jumping and the plotting of results on graphs. The Junior 4S Scientists concluded that this theory was mostly correct, with most of the pupils with the longest feet jumping the furthest. Conversely, Junior 4R discovered that pupils with the longest feet did not jump the furthest. This interesting and energetic investigation was enjoyed by all. 

This week Junior 3 have loved exploring the new maths app ‘1-Minute-Maths’. We have practised our mental addition and subtraction skills linked to our maths passports, all thanks to Tiny the Tortoise and his super interactive app. We are now excited to give it a try at home too – see the link in the main Chronicle page to find out more. We have also been having fun learning all about fabulous fractions, including how to shade them, how to sort them into unit and non-unit and how to add them to make a whole. We also placed fractions on a number line using the Mathletics programme. We have also really loved finding out more about coasts and how they are formed. Our art topic this term is reflecting this as we look at how to create…but we can’t say just yet, as it’s a surprise. Watch this space! We continue our journey with Mowzer the cat and have loved writing our stormy night descriptions. We have ventured into the word of personification and adverbials to help embellish our work with fantastic imagery.

This week, Junior 2 have fully immersed themselves in their current topic - The Great Fire of London. Our English focus has been information writing and we have been finding out lots of facts to record in our books. This has also been the perfect opportunity to think about different sentence openers for our written pieces. In History, we completed a timeline for the days which the fire began, raged and then ended. We also learnt about the history of the fire service, how it has changed from the leather buckets used to fight the Great Fire. Science week has also been lots of fun and we have learnt numerous interesting facts about worms. Everyone loved searching the grounds to find surface dwellers, deep burrowers and earth workers!

To start off Science Week, we set up an experiment to see which seeds and plants need to grow. We thought they would need light, warmth and soil - a growing medium, so we decided to check. Using cress seeds we set some up without light, some without water and some without anything to grow on. We also set up a control which had everything. Now we must wait and see what happens to the seeds in the coming weeks! Over in Maths the scales came out as we learnt how to weigh and compare the weights of different objects. We used the balance scales to help us see clearly if one object was heavier, lighter or the same as another one, and recorded our results clearly in our books.

For Science Week, Reception have been doing lots of investigation about ‘growing’! We have been watching our class caterpillars grow and change by the day, as they gobble up their food and practice spinning silk ready to make their cocoons. We have also been planning our cress investigation, deciding where we want to put the cress in our classrooms and how much water to give it. We have made predictions and can’t wait to watch it grow!