What We Have Been Learning - Week Beginning 5th December 2016
Rainbows – We have been learning more about the story of the first Christmas. We have all written a letter to Santa.
We have been so busy practising our Christmas play, and performing it to the nursery and then the whole school. We
also painted animals for our stable and drew pictures about our play. We have continued to enjoy our Santa’s
workshop to make up stories with animals in our ‘wintery land.’ We have begun to make Christmas decorations. We
were so excited and amazed to see snow falling on the playground! We shared describing words about how the snow
felt and looked and how we felt when we saw it! We wrote these on big snowflakes which we also decorated.
Year 1 – This week we have been learning to write an acrostic poem called ‘Winter’. We have been learning to start a
sentence with each letter in the word ‘Winter’ and have included an adjective in each one. We have written more letters
to fairy tale characters and have been learning to use more adjectives and to make our sentences even longer! In
Science we have talked about day and night and we were very interested to find out how the Earth spins on its axis and
moves around the sun. We asked some very interesting questions. We talked about how the daylight hours are shorter
in the winter and we were fascinated to see that the most northerly city in the world, in Norway, stays dark all day for 8
weeks in the year! We are looking forward to performing our Christmas play on Monday and Wednesday next week.
Year 2 – This week Year 2 have been learning about poetry in English. We have combined our poetry learning with a
snowy/winter theme and started off by writing acrostic poems using the word 'winter'. We concentrated on using
adjectives and adverbs and used collaborative improvement to make our work better. We discovered that when we read
our work out loud, we are more likely to spot any mistakes or parts which don't make sense. We went on to look at the
punctuation we could use and check that we have the right punctuation in the right places. We continued our poetry by
writing poems with a repeated first line. We will continue with this into next week and produce some winter art pieces to
help us mount our work. As a class story, we have been reading The Christmasaurus. In this story the elves only speak
in rhyme. We will be using the character 'Snozzletrump' to help us learn about rhyming words next week.
Year 3 – On Thursday, a flurry of snow swept across the Lower school playground engulfing the children in
excitement and wonder. The children made snow globes and snowflakes after finding out how a snowflake is
formed. They looked at various examples of snowflakes and their intricacies and recreated their symmetry using paint,
scissors and paper. We have continued to rehearse for our Christmas play in preparation for our first performance to
Beauclerc. In Maths, the children have been working on understanding and applying Measures i.e. Length (mm and cm).
They have also focused on solving problems using the short divison method. In English, the children have learnt how to
use onomatopoeias in their poems and have written a shape poem, applying all the skills they have learnt so far. i.e.
Similes, Alliteration and Onomatopoeias. Next week, we will begin our science topic 'Light and Shadows'.
Year 4 - As part of our science topic, ‘States of Matter’, the children have explored how snowflakes are formed. They
watched how a variety of crystal patterns emerged from a seed crystal, formed when water droplets freeze and attach to
dust. In order to bring the learning to life, the children set up their own crystal growing experiment. They made a
saturated solution of salt and water, in which they hung a length of cotton thread. Over the next few days we will wait
and enjoy watching our crystals grow.
Year 5 – This week Year 5 enjoyed developing their creative sides, with snow as a stimulus. We learned about 'value' as
an art term and had opportunities to develop this understanding through the art media of pastels and paint. We used a
process of tinting, when you mix a colour and white together, to create backgrounds and added details onto them. We
learned how to create effective and accurate shadows using shading and added these to our art. We also used pastels
to create 3d effects and created some wonderful snowmen pieces of art. The children have worked incredibly hard and
are extremely proud of their outcomes.
Year 6 –. This week in year 6 we have been writing the dialogue and action for the film The Snowman. We began our
learning by looking at pictures of snow and thinking about what we could actually see in the image and also used our
inference skills to 'read between the lines' and get extra information from the picture. This helped us to interpret the
animated film of The Snowman in more detail as there is no narrative spoken. Each child was given a section of the film
to write the dialogue and action before. We have particularly focused on learning how to use dialogue to move a story on
and how to strengthen verb choices. The finished sections, along with illustrations, will be put together to make a class
book. In Maths, Mrs Doyle's group have been solving problems involving more complex fractions, Miss Blundell's group
have been learning to convert between mixed and improper fractions as well as adding and subtracting fractions and
Miss Roberts' group have been simplifying fractions.