Year 1 had a very exciting start to the week; dressed as explorers they wandered around the school and came across Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen who spoke to them about their adventures! The children are incredibly enthusiastic to learn more about these and other explorers in their Topic lessons this term.
In English classes, Year 2 have been composing their own descriptive sentences to develop their creative writing skills. In Maths, the children have been exploring new mathematical symbols < > using less than and greater than. Whilst in Geography, they have deepened their research into the layers of the earth and had great fun creating their own models to demonstrate their knowledge.
Year 3 have been working hard in English to develop their own monsters for a narrative poem they will be writing. The children have been using powerful language, including adjectives, noun phrases, adverbs and prepositions to explain how their monster looks, smells, moves, sounds and feels. They have also had lots of fun in Topic, exploring light and shadows and how the movement of the sun affects this. The children have completed explorative lessons and experiments to identify and analyse how shadows are created and the factors that cause them to change shape.
Year 4 were posed the scientific question ‘excuse me, are these your teeth?’ and had a great time debating who or what animal different teeth belonged to. They have also started their English unit on playscripts and have been acting out a scene from Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’. The children enjoyed being an audience to see their friends act like different insects. In topic, they have learnt all about the mighty gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and created their own ‘top trumps’ card games to play with their friends.
Year 5 have been reading various myths, identifying their features and how they capture the essence of the time period in which they were written in. Science saw the children exploring how the earth is round and looked at some theories that propose the earth is flat. There was great discussion around this controversial topic and the children raised some very interesting points.
Year 6 have begun the new Spring Term with the energy and enthusiasm that we have come to expect. They have continued their study of Geometry by progressing from 2D to 3D shapes. Students explored the special characteristics that Platonic Solids share by building the shapes with their respective regular polygons. Through guided discovery, students ascertained Euler’s formula for the relationship between the edges, vertices and faces of 3D shapes. Students also continue to make great strides with their decimals and fractions. One extension exercise was figuring out why the French, in 1795, abandoned the decimal system for telling time, after only 2 years in operation. Can you figure it out?
Katherine Mustoe
Vice-Principal and Head of Primary
