Ashton Under Hill First School

Shaping Bright Futures Together


Willow Week Beginning 12th June

This week in Willow class we have been exploring rivers from around the world. We completed a fact hunt to answer a set of quiz questions including the longest river in the world, the river where the world's largest power station can be found and even the river containing a source of caviar. We worked together to answer the questions accurately and then use our new knowledge to create a set of Top Trump cards based on world rivers. We have continued to work on rivers in Art too and used pastels to add detail to our painted Monet work. We looked particuarly at how we can use small strokes to build up a textured effect rather than the use of block colour to make our Art work look effective. Also, the combination of paint and pastel and the effect that it has on the final piece. 

This week in Science, we started our new topic, 'Living Things and their Habitats'. We went through the different features of living organisms and then used a Carroll diagram to sort different animals, which generated lots of interesting questions. In Music, we learnt about the composer Talvin Singh and listened to two contrasting pieces by him. We'll be using one of these pieces as our inspiration for some composition next week. In French, we've been learning about and locating different Francophone countries on a map.

In Maths lessons, the children have been learning all about parallel and perpendicular lines and, as part of this, had to colour code a set of flags to identify the different types of lines. In addition to this, we have been learning about quadrilaterals and the properties we would use to describe the different examples. We applied our vocabulary of acute, obtuse and right angles as well as parallel and perpendicular lines. We then practised drawing some quadrilaterals, working hard to use the ruler to be accurate with this. The Years Threes have also been looking at how to measure accurately and they also did some work on horizontal and vertical lines.

As part of our work on Explanation Texts, we've continued to really enjoy Until I Met Dudley. We looked at some of the sentence structures used the book and used what we learnt to write some excellent, creative explanations of how a clock ticks. We have also had a focus on verbs used to show action and we have identified these in a text as well as used them in our own writing. We found that explanation texts contain many of these verbs as they are describing how a process works step by step. We will now be going on to plan and write our own explanations in the style of our text 'Until I met Dudley'.