Our cornerstones project, this term, is ‘School days’. Within this project, we will learning all about our school and locality, both today and in the past. We will compare schooling in the Victorian era to your experiences today.

For Science, we will be firstly looking at plant parts where we will learn about wild and garden plants by exploring the local environment. We will also be identifying and describing the basic parts of plants and observing how they change over time. We will then move on to our next Science project where we will learn about animals, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals and invertebrates. We will identify and describe their common structures, diets, and how animals should be cared for.

In art we will be looking at artwork depicting streets and buildings, focusing on the work of the American pop artist, James Rizzi. We will create a 3-D mural based on Rizzi's work. Design and Technology will allow us to learn about different sources of food and the preparatory skills of peeling, tearing, slicing, chopping, mashing and grating. We will use this knowledge and techniques to design and make a supermarket sandwich according to specific design criteria.

All of these wonderful learning experiences will help us to answer this projects Big Question: What was it like to go to school long ago?

What a busy term we will have! Make sure you take a look at the updates below where we will share our weekly learning with you.

Week 10

What a wonderful time we have had with Class 2 this week. They came to visit us and read their myths to us. We provided feedback and discussed what we liked about them.

Science

This week we completed out innovate challenge where we had to investigate earthworms!

We found out lots of information about them then went to explore the garden on the hunt for some wriggly friends who would help up in our experiment!

Our aim was to understand whether earthworms were able to sense light. We set up a tray with a paper towel, making it wet so that the worms could use the water to breathe, and covered one end so it was completely dark. We placed four worms in the light end and observed whether they moved to the dark end.

We definitely learned that they could sense light as they all moved to the dark side but we also saw how quickly a worm could move! They sped to the other side using their muscles to wriggle across. It was amazing to see but afterwards we made sure we returned the creatures back to where we found them, safe and sound.

Week 9

History

To complete our History project, School Days, we completed our innovate challenge. We worked in groups to collate facts about what schools were like in the Victorian days and then organised a presentation to give to the rest of the class. We all did really well with both the information we relayed and how we used our voices to project. 

Week 8

Religious Education

This week, we learn about what happens when a new baby is born into the Sikh faith. We used role play to show the family arrive at the Gurdwara and the Granthi opening the Guru Granth Sahib to find the letter that the name will begin with.

The meaning of names is very important to the Sikh faith. We researched the meanings of our names which was very interesting!

Week 7

Science

To start our new Science project, Animal Parts, we were given the question:

What is an animal?

After discussing it with a partner, we brought our ideas together as a class. We then watched the following video:

https://iframe.dacast.com/vod/e0fca63d7ceeb0dc78d6f49f821d0388/4553606f-edb1-c4f9-4516-526059b8588e

We then added extra facts that we now knew. You can tell the difference by looking at the photograph below. Facts in purple were before, green was after. Just look at how much we learned!

Religious Education

This week we have begun our new project Naam Karan.

The Naam Karan is a Sikh baby naming ceremony, and many Sikh parents bring their newborns to the Gurdwara (the Sikh temple) as soon as they are able to visit. 

For our memorable experience, we brought our doll babies and their accessories into school and enjoyed role playing a nursery. We took care of the babies and thought about how special they are to a family.

Week 6

Religious Education

We combined our learning from the whole term for our last lesson about the Jewish celebration of Purim by working in groups to design posters to advertise a Purim party!

Week 5

As a class, we thought about the following:

• When and why might we go to a party?
• What do we do at a party?
• Why do we go to parties?

We read the story It’s Party Time!: A Purim Story by Jonny Zucker. We thought about the costumes, gragger and the story of Esther.

We had great fun learning a Jewish celebratory dance, the Horah and performed it to some lively Jewish music.

Science

We completed our Innovate challenge this week and became Tree Detectives. 

We used our prior knowledge and collected evidence to try and identify which type of trees we had in our school environment.

We had great fun drawing detailed diagrams of the tree, collecting, drawing and describing leaves, and completing bark rubbings.

Week 4

Religious Education

This week we have been learning about how the Jewish people like to give gifts during Purim. This is called Mishloach Manot and must include two different types of food.

We thought about how giving gifts made us feel and how it is important to choose something that the receiver would enjoy.

After choosing a specific person to gift to, we designed our own Mishloach Manot basket.

Week 3

Religious Education

We read the story The Queen Who Saved Her Children.

We discussed how Jews like to remember this story during Purim and use their graggers to make noise showing their disapproval of Haman's actions.

In groups, we chose a part of the story, assigned characters, then produced freeze frames. We had great fun looking at the positions and facial expressions of the group to try and guess which part of the story they had chosen.

Week 2

Religious Education

To continue our exploration into the Jewish celebration of Purim, we talked about how Jewish people like to wear special clothes and costumes to mark the occasion.

We thought about when we have worn special clothes and how it made us feel.

Week 1

Science

This week, we have been looking at seasonal changes. In pairs, we observed the difference between a woodland in Winter and Spring and reported back to the class what we had noticed.

Religious Education

This week, we started our new project. We will be learning all about the Jewish faith and how they celebrate Purim.

Our memorable experience was to make as much noise as possible! What fun we had creating our own Graggers!