Children across the school have worked hard to regain their stamina for writing over the course of the academic year and it is wonderful to provide further challenging opportunities for pupils to develop their writing, through programmes such as the Brilliant Club’s Scholars Programme. The use of film has been highly effective in inspiring some of our Year 6 writers, as you can see from this example written by Emelia. 
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Other children have taken their passion further and written their own books. This superstar, who won a poetry competition earlier in the year and had her winning entry published in a book of poems, is currently writing a chapter book inspired by her pet cat. She describes it as a fictional story based on what she imagines her cat’s world is like, except her fictional cat is scared of sardines! Having read J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, she was inspired to have a go at writing some fiction herself and hasn’t looked back since. ​

Year 2 Outdoor Learning Club Blog

We’ve had such a fun time at Outdoor Learning this term.
With such fantastic weather, we’ve had the chance to do lots of different activities involving hunting for things in nature. We went on a Nature Hunt around the school grounds. We used our senses of feeling, smelling, sight and listening to discover the awe and wonder of nature around us. The children each had a Nature Hunt list to complete. We even found a slow worm!

‘My favourite thing on the Nature Hunt was feeling the softness of the Lamb’s Ears flowers in the outdoor garden.’
 ‘I liked sitting in the quiet area listening to the birds.’
‘I liked finding out about some of the different flowers.’
‘I liked going onto the field to look for different bugs.’
 
One week we went outside on a scavenger hunt to find inspiration for paintings. We then used these back in the classroom to help us create our own paintings of nature.

 ‘My favourite week was when we did the painting because I love painting.’

Another time, we used the idea of using art with nature to recreate our own 3D nature artwork on the playground.
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‘I really enjoyed collecting leaves, twigs, stones, flowers and feathers to create my own pictures.’
 
Being able to use our school’s new mud kitchen (where some of us pretended to be archologists digging up ancient stones and treasures) was such fun. We’ve also used the sandpit to pretend we were at the beach. We worked as a team to make the sand wet enough so we could build a sandcastle using different objects. Our fortress looked amazing!

‘My favourite part of outdoor learning club was mixing the water with the sand to make wet sand. I really liked filling up the buckets with the sand and putting it with my friend’s castles to make one big sandcastle.’

Finally, we’ve been doing some weeding, digging over and planting in one of the outdoor gardens. More teamwork was needed to complete this job, which we did brilliantly. We’ve planted some Sweet William seeds, which we are hoping will have grown by the time we return to school in September.

It’s been a fantastic year 2 club summed up perfectly by E who said, ‘I would like to do this club again because I had so much fun. I like looking and learning about nature. I also like creating my own art without having to do colouring.’ 

Last week in Year 4 Maths, pupils enjoyed the opportunity to learn about angles.  As with various other maths topics, the pupils loved the YouTube Numberock song!  Rumour has it that some pupils are even planning to perform these at our upcoming end-of-year talent show.
 
We learnt to recognise degrees as a way of measuring the angle where two lines meet.  We have explored the labels acute, right, obtuse and straight as a way of categorising different illustrations and begun to measure these with some accuracy.
 
Some pupils enjoyed illustrating angles outside on the playground using objects, including themselves, to make lines.  It was great to see their creativity.  Other pupils embraced the chance to experiment with using protractors for the first time.
 

Well done Year 4 for your great effort, throughout this year in Maths.  Keep it up!

In our reception classes we have been very lucky this term. They have been observing the life cycle of a caterpillar first hand in our classroom! It has been exciting watching the caterpillars make cocoons around themselves and then turn into butterflies. All the children watched in amazement!  

We released them last Wednesday to set them off on a beautiful journey.