Week 1

What we've been up to this week...

Welcome back and Happy New Year!!

Our first week back was full of fun learning. We started our week with two days of poetry, where were learned the poem The Old Dry Stone Wall. We went for a walk to gather vocabulary and ideas then came back and listened to the poem. We wrote our responses to the poem, including what we liked and what we noticed. Then we analysed the structure, focussing on the layout and rhyming pattern. We learned parts of the poem and performed it as a group. We discussed performance techniques and reflected on our poetry readings. The next day we took some of the stanzas from the poem, The Old Dry Stone Wall and created our own versions. We then performed these individually. I was very impressed with how the children engaged with the poetry unit and really enjoyed listening to their own poems.

As well as this, in English we watched a spooky poem and responded to it. We were told we could spend £5 on effective words and phrases from the poem. Each one cost £1. It was really hard to choose but we worked really well, discussing why certain words and phrases were more effective than others. This was the start of our English genre - mystery stories! It's going to be a great few weeks in English!

In PE we have started a dance unit and also hockey. In our dance session, we watched a video of a performance by Diversity to get us all excited about dancing! First we moved around the hall to various songs with different tempos and melodies, to get used to feeling the music and letting go of our embarrassment and nerves. It was lots of fun! Then we explored different movements with our feet and then our arms. We combined them and together we then came up with a sequence of moves for the first 24 beats of the song. 

In maths we looked at multiplying and dividing by 8 and also refreshed our multiplication and division skills from last half term. 

We have started a new unit in RE, in which we will explore 'Why do Christians sing in worship?' We watched some videos of Christians singing together and talked about what we noticed. 

It's been so nice to have the children back in school. It's lovely to have a break but I do miss them over the holidays!! 

Miss S x