The School Council and other pupils from across KS1 and KS2, enjoyed entertaining the residents of St Clement’s Nursing Home, with their festive carols.
The children sang a range of songs from ‘Jingle Bells’ to ‘ Away in a Manger’. The residents and staff, had a brilliant time and all joined in with many of the songs.
We wish everyone at St Clement’s Nursing Home a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
School Council
We have been learning about shadows are formed.
We made reindeer shadow puppets, we had to carefully cut out our puppet and attach it to an art straw.
Using a light source (a torch) we investigated how shadows were formed. We investigated what happens when the object (the puppet) was put nearer or further away from the light source.
We found out that a shadow is formed when an object blocks the light.
This afternoon, Reception were very pleased and excited to have their parents visit them in their class. The children carried out a variety of activities including making Christmas cards, counting Christmas objects, colouring in, and painting their salt dough tree decorations. We had lots of fun and would like to thank those parents that joined us.
As part of our topic, The Victorians, Year 6 have been looking at a famous artist, William Morris. We noticed that his designs are repetitive and have different aspects of nature in them, including lots of flowers. He inspired us to do our own designs in our sketchbooks. Have a look in the Key Stage 2 corridor and see if you can spot them.
We turned these designs into clay tiles. We will be painting them as soon as they dry!
On Monday, Year 1 received a letter from Chester Zoo. The Zoo was asking for help from the Year 1’s helpful children. An animal had escaped and they needed to find out what animal it was. We explored different groups of animals and found out that the animal that had escaped was a mammal. We know that mammals are warm blooded, have hair or fur and give birth to their young. Miss Tsang found the animal hiding in the playground, it was a baby panda! We needed to find out how to look after it, so we read and researched about Pandas and wrote our facts into super sentences. We used our fantastic phonics knowledge and remembered our capital letters, finger spaces and full stops.
This week Green Class took a step back in time and became archaeologists for the day. In the morning we excavated artefacts from the sand, brushed them clan and had to decide whether they were from the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age or another time period. Once we had done this we set up our museum display and discussed the artefacts we liked with our group. We had great fun, excavating in the sand.
In the afternoon we had the chance to experience what it might be like to live as a hunter gatherer. We made an arrow using a flint arrow head, a stick and some string. Next we had a go at making flour from seeds, this was hard work and took over an hour and a half to get less than half a cup of flour fine enough to use. We also had the chance to weave and use a spindle to spin wool. Our las activity was to make a bracelet using animal teeth and beads.
We had a great day experiencing life as it might possibly have been back in the Stone Age period.
Ask Year 3 which part of the day they enjoyed the most.
On Friday, Reception were lucky enough to visit Ash End House Farm. The children really enjoyed their visit and learn lots of new things. We saw lots of different farm animals which we got to feed and hold. However, the most exciting part of our day was meeting Santa and his reindeer. The children each had a photo with Santa and received a present. After a busy morning the children went into the play area and did lots of bouncing on the bouncy pillow!
Our story of the week has been Norman the slug with the silly shell.
This is a funny story about a slug who wants to be a snail. He doesn’t have a shell so he goes off to find one. He decides a doughnut makes a great shell but unfortunately Norman is not the only one who likes doughnuts!
The children really enjoyed this story. It was lovely to see them listening so well and laughing at the funny parts.
This week we also started getting ready for Christmas. We have been practising our Christmas songs and we are really looking forward to singing them for our mums and dads next week.
We have also decorated the tree and the classroom is looking festive!
As usual we have also been busy learning through our play. Here are some photos to show you some of the things we have been doing:
Making shields
Playing in the home corner
Building in the construction area
This week was Year 2’s class assembly. We looked at how Christmas was celebrated around the world. We found out that different Christian countries have very different traditions for celebrating Christmas and the birth of Jesus.
In Poland they look for the first star in the sky before they begin their celebrations. This star is called the Gwiazda. In China their celebrations are held on Christmas eve and they decorate their trees with beautiful paper lanterns. In Australia they have a Christmas BBQ on the beach in the hot sun! They all wear Santa hats and eat lots of yummy food.
The children were fantastic. They all had loud and clear voices and sang their songs really well.
