Oak Week Beginning 20th November 2023

We have been continuing to write explanation texts in English this week. Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions have been inspiring us to explain some of their amazing inventions. The children have explained the workings of the Snowmanatron and the Snoozatron, under my guidance to support them in including all the necessary features an explanation text needs. They have been trying very hard to work on their editing skills to improve the quality of their sentences.

In Maths, the Year 4's have worked their way through all the times tables facts and have been successfully applying them in problems. The Year 5's have investigated squared and cubed numbers this week using cubes to model what these numbers look like to help them visualise the concept.

In Science, we have been finding out how fossils are formed and made some concept cartoons to explain this process. The Year 4's sequenced the events and matched explanations to the pictures and the Year 5 children wrote their own descriptions of each stage, both using lots of scientific vocabulary.

In Art we have been colour mixing using primary colours to create secondary and tertiary colours, displaying them all in a colour wheel. They then used these mixing skills to create a colour wash of a sunset backdrop adding in a digital image of the Skara Brae, a  Neolithic settlement on Orkney, to create a picturesque scene of this Scottish island. Our Topic lesson saw us reliving the discovery of this prehistoric settlement and the children became journalists, retelling the discovery.

In Music we have started to look at the difference between pulse and rhythm and the class took part in some clapping games, trying to spot the pulse and learning to add a rhythm. We managed clapping in unison; half of us clapping the pulse and the rest clapping the rhythm. They also had success passing the pulse using a tambourine.

We were once again very proud of the Oak children on Wednesday as they acted as guides to show prospective new parents around the school during our Open Morning. They had many, many compliments and did a fabulous job explaining what a wonderful school we have.