This year’s theme is a connected commonwealth. This is to encourage collaboration to protect natural resources and the environment.  

As a school we also looked at how we could link it to our own cooperative values.  

During the week various activities took place in classes throughout the school. 
  
In Reception, the children looked at how they can look after their own environment and how this can be the same in other countries in the Commonwealth. They then looked at the importance of recycling and sorted a range of different everyday objects into the correct bins.   

In year 1, they tried a range of different foods from some of the Commonwealth countries. They discussed as classes what they thought about different tastes and compared them to the common food that they eat. 
 
Year 2 researched the countries of the Commonwealth and wrote acrostic poems to share learnt information. 
 
In year 3 and 4, they use different resources to find out interesting facts about the Commonwealth and then linked it to the theme. They researched what the Commonwealth is and the importance of it. This led to discussions within class. Year 4 then designed their own flags.  

Year 5 also researched what the Commonwealth is and then took part in a class quiz linking to the research they had completed. They then designed a poster linking to the Commonwealth statement and our school values.  
​
In year 6 revisited the Commonwealth and applied this knowledge to our cooperative values, especially how they are linked and how they can apply them to their own lives. They then discussed how all of this can be used to improve their own lives and the environment around them.  ​

This week we have been preparing for our SATs next week. We have been completing extra grammar lessons to help our understanding of the curriculum in preparation for our tests.
  
We have also been taking part in French conversations about what food we like and dislike – some of our conversations were interesting; we have been justifying our choice of favourite food. We also started to look at comments about the food and what we might say about it.
​  
During D&T, we have been attempting to recreate a bird’s eye view of an Ancient Greek city in an attempt to create our own version in the style of the Ancient Greeks. ​

​Following previous year groups excitement surrounding investigating a teacher’s missing packet of biscuits and last year’s faux police incident, we know that Year 2 children are up for a challenge…especially around SATs season.
 
Have you been wondering why the school building work seems to dragging on for a while?  This half term Year 2 will be analysing videos, photos and spreadsheets to discern what is going on.  The children will be reading and responding to messages on the Google Classrooms platform as part of their learning.
 
Although e-safety is a frequent theme covered within Computing lessons, the experience of instant messaging within a safe virtual classroom enables learning opportunities about aspects such as appropriate use of devices, comments making and content in a way pupils have found very applicable.
 
If you have any questions regarding this half term’s Computing, how this relates to the broader Computing curriculum or online safety, please speak with your child’s class teacher.
 
We hope that you enjoy the video!
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svwkD_OMgaU

After a restful Easter break we have been excited to start our new topic about ‘Film and Photography’. We were extremely lucky to have an opportunity to handle a large selection of very old cameras. Some of them were fairly modern so dated back to the 1990’s but others were from the 1940’s so we needed to hold them very carefully! We were surprised at how big and heavy most of them were. Some of them were difficult to work out how you would take a photo with them.
  
In computing this week we have been learning how to edit a photo on the computer. We changed the colour and size before adding some writing over the top of it. Some of us could add a border and crop the image. We then printed out our photo using the photocopier.
 
In maths we have been learning about fractions. We really enjoyed the lesson where we needed to find non-unit fractions of a number because we used Smarties to help us. We each had a small box that we sorted into the different colours before writing them as fractions. Some of us were then able to write the fractions in a simplified way. 
This week in English we started a new unit on narrative writing with our class book being The Iron Man. We have been focussing on character descriptions and learnt about similes, metaphors and personification. We used familiar film characters to practise using these devices in our own descriptions. 
 ​