The Chronicle

In their current Science topic, Junior 6 are exploring light. We are thinking about how it travels, how shadows are created and how our eyes enable us to see. This week, the children made their own colour wheels. These showed us how white light is made up of the colours of the rainbow and how, when travelling fast enough, those colours merge to create white light. We also experimented with a selection of prisms to investigate how rainbows are created. In our last session, we delved into shadows in more detail and created our own shadow puppets. We focused on how we could change the silhouette and light source to change the clarity and shape of the shadow created.

This week Junior 5L have been learning about Holy Week and they revised the Easter story. The children also learnt about the different elements of the Easter Vigil. They thought about the Paschal (Easter) Candle which is a large, white candle lit during the Easter service. The candle is often decorated with symbols of Christ's resurrection, such as a cross or an image of the resurrected Christ. The Paschal candle represents Jesus' resurrection and triumph over death, and is a symbol of hope and new life. The children enjoyed creating their own Paschal Candles using paper, scissors, tape and colouring pencils.

Junior 4 continued with their second week of swimming at the Xcel Sport and Leisure Centre in Coventry. The Swim England Learn to Swim Framework is about developing confident and competent swimmers through fun and enjoyment, and the Learn to Swim Stages are at the heart of the Swim England Learn to Swim Programme. It is the most widely known part of swimming lessons for children and is the backbone of swimming lessons for primary school aged children. Each of the seven stages of the Swim England Learn to Swim Framework has a clear set of targets for the pupils to meet so they can get to the next stage.

This Programme not only teaches a child to swim using the four strokes – front crawl, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly. It also gives them several other skills, which when put together, give children the ability to do a range of other water-based sports. This gives the pupils confidence in their ability to swim. From this comes more enjoyment of swimming, a love for swimming and being in the water and the skills and motivation required to lead a healthy and active lifestyle through regular swimming which will continue into adult life.

This week Junior 3 have fully immersed themselves in their new topic on Ancient Greece, busily gathering ideas and planning phrases to describe the gruesome character of the Minotaur! Captivated by this mythical villain, pupils have scoured the thesaurus for exciting adjectives and adverbs. Armed with some wonderful new vocabulary, we are now engrossed in writing some fantastic descriptions. In our Art lessons, we have also begun to explore aspects of Greek art and architecture, with Junior 3H looking at Greek temples and Junior 3V exploring Ancient Greek pottery. We are really looking forward to the upcoming Coronation Celebrations and have been busy making preparations.

Junior 2 have had a productive week right across the board, but here are just a few examples. They have been working hard to understand finding quarters of amounts and we have been using concrete apparatus and pictorial methods. Many of us have been halving and then halving again to find the correct answer. In Art, we watched a video called Austin’s Butterfly. This showed us how our first draft does not have to be our final version and that we can adapt to improve and to build on our resilience when facing tasks we find tricky. Our English lessons have been about producing a good description of the man in The Tin Forest book. The children reviewed the use of prepositions, expanded noun phrases before applying it to writing their descriptions.

Junior 1 have been loving Science this week while learning about the life cycles of a frog and a bird. They also learnt that frogs and toads are similar, but frogs lay their eggs in a clump and toad’s eggs are laid in a long string! In History they began to look at toys that were played with in the past and discovered that most old toys were hand-made from natural materials. They also found out that the richer the family, the more toys you had. This linked in well with DT where everyone had a chance to make a pneumatic monster toy, that when a syringe is pushed in, the monster's mouth opens, revealing some scary looking teeth!! In English we continued with our book, Handa’s Surprise, but this time the children were creating their own version, with their own surprises!

In Reception this week, the children went on a walk through the woods on Kenilworth Common. We planned what we would need to take with us to keep us safe and to enjoy our adventure. The children stopped to play ‘Pooh Sticks’ in the stream and we enjoyed a snack before exploring in the woods. We had a wonderful time!

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