Magna Carta Assembly

KS2 learnt all about the Magna Carta 800 anniversary this week in a national assembly organised by Discovery Education and led by Dan Snow and Diane Louise Jordan. They heard about how our rights date back from this time and the impact it had on the development of democracy throughout the world. Pupils were able to discuss the freedoms we have today and the fact that these don't exist everywhere world wide.

Beginning a new topic... The Venerable Bede

During the Easter break year 3 were tasked with researching their new topic, that of the Venerable Bede.

Who was Bede? Why is he important? What can we learn from his life? These questions and more were the challenges face by our class and each child worked extremely hard to gather as much information to answer these puzzling historical questions. 

Here we shared our learning with each other to further broaden our knowledge.

Creatures of Myth and Legend.

During our Myths and Legends topic we have been working on using descriptive language to create our own terrifying monsters. We used lots of examples such as 'The Minotaur' & 'Cyclops' to name a few. Here, Joe described his monster to Mr Noble who tried to draw it on the board.

What do you think?

Magna Carta- 800 years of freedom!

We learnt all about the significance of the Magna Carta in assembly last week. It's 800 years since it was sealed and we have created an interactive display in our school hall all about it. The timeline that has been sent out to all schools as part of the commemoration of this historic national event is extremely informative and teachers will use assemblies to talk about other events that have led to the freedoms we enjoy today.

Happy St George's Day! Love from Reception

We have had such a fantastic day celebrating St George's Day! Everyone looked super dressed in red and white. We walked into class this morning to find dragon footprints leading to our pirate cave and the treasure chest! It was a bit scary, but the we heard the story about brave St George and how he killed the last dragon (phew!).

We thought the story was so good that many of us chose to re-tell it in different ways and have dragons in our role play.

One child chose to paint a flag with George's red cross on.

Adam drew a picture of a dragon breathing fire and wrote the word dragon by sounding it out himself!

Mia made the story characters using play dough- the green dragon, the king (who later got a crown made), red George and the princess with yellow hair.

Some children chose to make Happy St George's day cards

We all made shields with the lovely Miss Carpenter and decorated them in glitter. We can't wait for them to be dry tomorrow so we can play with them!

We all loved eating our lunch outside accompanied by patriotic music!

And finally, we loved playing outside this afternoon. Children helped draw and colour in a shield for George and a dragon. Shay said this was a good dragon and that dragons can actually be quite helpful, you know! They can light bonfires and cook your burgers so they are ready straight away without you having to wait!! (What's not to love?!)

St George's Day 2015!

We have had a fantastic day in school today celebrating St George's Day! The beautiful weather meant we were able to have our garden party on the Key Stage 1 Yard! A fun day was had by all!

'We are William Morris' Apprentices'-Phoebe.

Last week we completed our William Morris paintings. William Morris was an artist who lived during the Victorian era whose work was admired by Queen Victoria. With their new found knowledge the children created their own pictures using colouring pencils and then turned them into paintings. I overheard some of the girls saying,'we are artists, we are really good at this.' It was great to hear the class having such a good time whilst they are learning. 

Victorian Measures

This week we have continued our measures unit in Maths, we completed a carousel of measures activities with a Victorian theme linked to Topic on Monday! Take a look...

Queen Victoria wanted her ladies in waiting to wear ribbons in their hairs for her ball! Only ribbons over 9cm would fit, so we used rulers to measure them and decide which ones were suitable! 

George Stephenson needed an extra lump of coal to power his steam engine! He needed the coal to weigh 1kg or over, we used scales to select correct the lumps of coal for him!

Queen Victoria requested more of our delicious cheese straws, the baker needed at least 500g (1/2kg) of flour to make them! We used the balance to decide which bags of flour weighed 500g or more!

The Tanner needed more poop to treat his leather! He needed a container with a capacity of at least 1 litre (1000ml). We tallied how much the containers could hold, then selected the most suitable container!

The poor matchstick girl had no shoes! Her feet were very cold! We measured how much further she'd need to walk using a metre stick, we gave her the determination she needed to cross the road!

Art inspired by William Morris

Y6 have recently studied artwork by the Victorian artist William Morris. Nature was a huge inspiration for Morris as is apparent within his many patterns. We extended one of his original designs to begin with in order to develop our sketching skills. We then designed a tile which we could use for a pattern of our own. Just look at our fantastic artwork!

Ancient Greek Art

We have had a very art driven couple of weeks in our creative curriculum topic. Firstly the children were given a homework task of creating terrifying Medusa masks from the Ancient Greek Myth of "Perseus And The Gorgons Head," the children worked really hard and the results were spectacular!

Later in the week and during the parent workshop the children of year 3 and year 4 decorated Ancient Greek pottery. After a very messy plaster lesson in class the children created their brilliant bowls which ended up looking fantastic.

Durham University

Last week, on Friday we were visited by John from Durham University. He was extremely impressed with our prior knowledge of the life and times of Queen Victoria. 

We had the opportunity to look at, draw and label some real artefacts from the Victorian times. Below you can see some children measuring a silver candlestick with care. 

In the afternoon we looked at an old map of the local area to see what it was like in the Victorian times, (the school was just a field). We used our brilliant map skills to create individual maps of the journey  we take from our home to school. As a class we created a large map of everyone's journeys. 

We had a brilliant day and learnt lots of new facts. 

The children produced an excellent map showing their journeys to school. 

Victorians

This week we had some visitors from Durham University for a one day workshop all about the Victorians! Our visitors were very impressed by all of the amazing facts we already knew about Queen Victoria and the Victorian period!

We looked at what our local area was like in Victorian times using our map skills, then we drew our own map to show what the area looks like now! We talked about the similarities and differences!

We also looked at what homes were like in the Victorian times and even got to look at some real Victorian artefacts! We dressed up as Victorians too and next week we will be drawing self- portraits of ourselves as Victorians to follow the session up!

We learned lots of new facts and enjoyed a fun filled day!