This week the children have enjoyed watching and performing in our Chinese New Year celebrations. It is a particularly special highlight of our academic year as we come together to celebrate our host country’s culture and it was lovely to share this with our parents.
We began the week celebrating with the rest of the school as we watched the fantastic dragon and lion dances as well as the brilliant drumming from some of our Key Stage 2 students. I am sure you will also agree that the children and Mandarin department put on spectacular performances – it was such a treat to enjoy a variety of acts. Thank you also to parents for coming along to join the celebrations and the beautiful clothes that the children wore.
Of course, learning has also continued even with these performances and celebrations.
Year 1 have continued with their poetry topic and have worked extremely well to write some dinosaur poems making sure to include a variety of adjectives, nouns and verbs. They also enjoyed their adventures around the school on Explorers Day.
In Year 2 the children have been focusing on grammar in English; learning about apostrophes and commas. This can be a little tricky but they have all been trying very hard to implement what they have learnt in their work. In topic they have discussed what they know and decided what they would like to investigate about weather. Tornadoes and hurricanes seemed to be at the top of the list!
Year 3 have been developing their skills and having fun at telling the time and in English have been learning about exclamation marks, commas and pronouns. The children also had an opportunity to go outside and make some of their own houses suitable for the Stone Age.
Year 4 have been developing their play scripts from the story of Pandora’s Box. The children had lots of fun predicting what might be in the box, then writing their own endings to the script. In Maths they have been measuring mass, converting grams and kilograms, reading scales and solving word problems using RUCSAC.
Year 5 have begun an explanation text unit in English; children are learning about Tim Peake, and explaining how the perfect breakfast machine works on the ISS. In Maths, they have focused on negative numbers in the context of temperatures, and adding/subtracting near multiples of the powers of ten. In science, they have explored how the planets orbit the sun and the belief that it was the other way around in ancient civilisations.
Year 6 have been learning about the differences between formal and informal English this week, with abbreviations and slang terms at one end of the scale and the subjunctive form at the other. Although a difficult concept to master, the children have tried extremely hard. In Maths the children have been studying the division of decimal values and have even recapped volume with many students electing to complete additional practice online in their spare time.
Well done to all our children on a very successful week!
Ms Mustoe
Head of Primary
