It has been a wonderful final week of 2023 in Leaders class.
This week, we have enjoyed Christmas crafts with families in school, made Christingles for the whole school, enjoyed Christmas dinner together, visited the pantomime and taken part in the Christingle service. It has been a busy but brilliant end to 2023 in school.
We hope that everyone has a lovely Christmas break!
Here are our diary dates for the autumn term 2023 (updated 27.09.2023): Autumn Term Dates 2023
Sleights put on 2 wonderful nativity performances this week. The Church was packed and the atmosphere was magical. Learners class shone in their roles of shepherds and angels and they enjoyed every moment of it.
In English this week we have been creating story maps around the advert Sprout Boy and are keen to begin writing our narratives next week.
We have enjoyed lots of stories this week and Learners have been bringing in their favourite Christmas stories from home to enjoy in the classroom.
We had a wonderful day on Friday, finishing our DT Christmas decorations. We were successful in threading needles and showed some amazing sewing skills. We cut templates and pinned these to our chosen fabric. We then cut around these carefully, fastened them to hessian squares and decorated them with sequins and sparkles. We were delighted to take these home at the end of the day and display these proudly at home. We will be evaluating our design and creations next week.
Next week is jampacked with Christmas crafts, a Christingle service, Christmas dinner and parties and a trip to the pantomime. Hold on to your hats, it’s going to be lots of fun!
Learners class wish you all hope, peace and love for the Christmas holidays ahead.
The Leaders have been busy over the past few weeks in subjects across the curriculum.
In maths, the children have been learning about fractions. They can add, subtract, multiply and divide with fractions and use these methods when solving problems. Great work!
In English, the children have developed their persuasive skills to write an advert to advertise visits to the Alps. The children were able to use a range of persuasive devices in their finished pieces to ensure that they met the purpose of this text type. As we are now in the run up to Christmas, Leaders have also enjoyed some festive narrative writing. Inspired by the advert ‘Excitable Edgar’, the children changed elements of the story to make it their own. The finished stories are amazing with a range of openers, amazing vocabulary and good use of punctuation throughout.
In history, the children have been learning about the Roman’s impact of Britain. They have learned about public baths, aqueducts, town life and religion.
In DT, the children have designed and created their own bags. They have used templates, cut fabric and used pins to secure it onto another piece of material. To complete their bags, Leaders used both hand-stitching and a sewing machine. The finished bags looks incredible!
In art, the children have been applying their drawing skills to landscapes and portraiture. The photos in the gallery below showcase some of their fabulous work!
As well as everything else that has been going on, the Pioneers have had a look at The Nutcracker We have listened to the wonderful music and danced and moved in time. We read the story together and they were fascinated that the toys came to life. We watched a beautiful performance of the ballet from The Royal Opera House and they loved the costumes and seeing the orchestra. We also had a bit of a chat about real and imaginary because some parts of the story are a bit scary. We also took time to prepare for next week’s trip to the pantomime. We are filled with excitement and wonder.
The festive period has begun and we have been busy preparing for oncoming Christmas activities.
In RE we have been thinking about the different symbols of advent. To consolidate our learning, we were lucky to be able to visit St John’s Church on Friday to look around and identify the signs of advent first hand. We could see the Church colours were purple, which matched our class prayer space. We saw an advent wreath with 5 candles, which represented the 4 Sundays of advent and 1 for Christmas Day. We stood in awe of the magnificent nativity stained-glass window and could identify some key people from the Christmas story.
In art this week, we produced some wonderful self-portraits. We have been working very hard on developing our drawing skills and techniques and were able to showcase these in our fantastic self-portraits. We were extremely proud of the results.
We are keen to begin writing our narratives next week, based around the Christmas advert ‘Sprout Boy’. This week we have been looking closely at Sprout Boy’s emotions through the story and have thought about different story starters. We are all bursting with ideas for our own individual stories.
We are looking forward to performing our nativity performance of Superstar this week at St John’s Church. If the rehearsals are anything to go by, the audience are in for a real treat!
The Pioneers all love cutting and sticking and this week we have added other techniques for joining materials. They have used treasury tags, paper fasteners, paperclips and elastic bands. They tried a bit of weaving the paper and sticking with tape and blutac. They have experimented with cutting slits and tabs to join and have been incredibly focussed and skilled in this. There was not prototype or model to complete and the variety of structures was magnificent. Their creations were used in play during the week. This exploration will continue.
This week we have been reading Lost and Found and the playing has been wonderful. A boat and a selection of maps have been added to the classroom and these have been very useful. The Pioneers wrote lists of what to pack for their journey. The played with the animals of the antarctic. They looked at globes and maps and atlases and Google Earth to spot the icy land masses. They were very interested in what a harbour was. We talked through the story map adding vocabulary and even sentences. The Pioneers are spotting punctuation all over the place.Mrs Gurney worked with the ipads and made videos of ourselves retelling the story.
So much learning this week.
This week the Pioneers discussed their Advent Calendars and we are starting to get a bit excited about Christmas! We looked at our class book,The Path To the Church which details all the events in the Christian Church calendar. We changed the prayer space cloth to purple to reflect the colours seen in church and we will look for these signs of Advent when we visit next week. We then made our own Advent crowns and put in the candles. We discussed the colours and the textures and the hazards of flower arranging.
The oasis rings were a source of many questions and experimentation.
Hello Visitors,
This week has been AMAZING! We have enjoyed writing our adverts, to try and tempt people to visit the Alps. Did you know the Alps attract over 30,000,000 people each year and they were formed over 65,000,000 years ago? They are the youngest mountain range in the world!
Not only have we been enjoying English, we have also learned lots more about Tudors in history. This week, we studied Elizabeth I, and why her time in reign is known as the Golden Era. Here we are presenting our findings to the rest of the class:
