Oak Week Beginning 17th April 2023
Welcome the Summer Term!
We have been blessed with some beautiful weather this week and that has allowed us to get out and about the school grounds to do some of our learning outside. On Monday we made our own plant pots out of recycled cardboard which was quite a soggy task, but was, none the less good fun. We had varied success and some children were more successful on their second attempt. On Tuesday we then used our new plant pots to plant the seeds we were hoping would germinate over the Easter holidays. Sadly, only the tomato seeds showed any sign of waking up, but we planted them anyway hoping their new environment might encourage the seeds to grow. We also planted a variety of other seeds to fill our class 'beds' in the quiet area. Finger crossed they all grow as well as the beautiful bulbs that are now flowering and looking splendid!
We have also taken down the rain gauges we set up 6 weeks ago, which were surprisingly very full! We measured the amount of water they contained and used our newly learnt IT skills to draw a graph in Excel to show how much water each gauge had collected. This linked very well with our computing lessons all about data collection, our maths lessons on statistics and with our climate studies in topic - excellent connections, which is our whole school theme for this half term.
On Wednesday, a group of children swam in the swimming gala and were very pleased with their performances. Please click here for the separate news blog.
Thursday was a glorious day, and we maximised on the sunshine by doing a group reading activity outside. It was lovely to see the children enthusiastic about their reading and sharing the enjoyment of the stories with each other. In our writing lessons this week, we have been creating a persuasive leaflet to try to encourage people to be more aware of how their every day lives affect the environment. The children have worked really hard to include lots of persuasive and emotive language, create cohesion between their sentences and paragraph and include some relative clauses. Our end of the day reader is a book called Bill's New Frock by Anne Fine which is challenging our ideas of gender stereotyping and in PSHE this week we talked about the way boys and girls are viewed traditionally and in more modern times. We had some very interesting discussions!
Due to the last half term being very short, we have got a couple more weeks studying Climate Zones and Biomes before we start on our new topic all about rivers. This week in topic we are using the Eden Project to inspire us to design a woodland biome zone that would protect all the plants and animals in our woodlands for the future. They will also look at the danger humans pose to these habitats and what we can do to avoid harming these environments.
We are also getting ready for the Coronation, we have got lots of ideas to help us to celebrate this historic moment and we have already started to learn a song, which we are attempting to accompany with percussion instruments!
Lots of fun to look forward to this half term.
