23 24 Hawthorn Wb 08 January

Happy New Year to all of you!

It has been a happy and productive start to the new year here in school.  The children were all glad to be back, to see their friends and to share all their news.

As usual, we have been busy across all our lessons.

In English, we have started to work on a new book, Fatou, fetch the water,  where the main character has a task to do and keeps getting interrupted by her neighbours.  There is lots of lovely descriptive language and as it is set in The Gambia, there is also a lot of new and unusual words and images that fit in really well with our whole school key theme, Diversity.

In maths the Year 1 children are continuing to work on numbers up to 20 and the Year 2 children have been working on 2 digit addition using a blank number line.  Look at the photographs to see them hard at work!

This week, we've kicked off our new topic with a super creative project. Our whole school theme is Diversity and Hawthorn's topic is 'What lies beneath' - in which the children will be learning all about the world's oceans. What better way to start than with some art! We've been working on pictures inspired by Hokusai's 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' and the children have once again impressed us with their artistic skills! Their pictures have involved line work and pastels, and we're looking forward to sharing our gallery with you next week. In the meantime, you'll find a sneak preview among this week's photos.

In Science we started our new topic on Plants and the children had to think like scientists to answer a big question, "Why don't all plants look the same?" We shared some ideas and we will think about this again in a few weeks once we have done some more learning about this subject.

Finally, in Music we started our new block, this time on rock music.  The children have been learning a song called, "I wanna play in a band".  I think we have the beginnings of some rock fans in Hawthorn class!