Monthly archives: December 2020


Self-portraits by Scafell

Over the last few weeks, year 5 and year 6 have been exploring the work of Julien Opie and creating their own self-portraits.

Julien Opie is a British, contemporary artist who creates distinctive depictions of figures, landscapes and most famously, portraits.  His work is highly stylised with black outlines and solid blocks of flat colour.

Pupils in Scafell have captured their facial features and characteristics in these striking ‘pop-art’  paintings.

 

 


Skara Brae and Stonehenge

We are learning about the New Stone Age or Neolithic this week in history. Here we are creating models of amazingly in tact Stone Age constructions that we can still see today, perhaps nearly 5000 years after they were built!

Year 3 and 2 were learning about the world famous Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands. It was only discovered in 1850 and is a small village of 8 houses linked together with covered tunnels. You didn’t need to put your coat on to visit your neighbours here!

Year 4 researched Stonehenge, another very famous Neolithic construction made up of circles of stones which took hundreds of years to construct. Like us adding extensions to our houses, Neolithic people kept changing things at Stonehenge so it developed over a long time with new stones being added or the existing ones being moved.

We had a great time this morning, creating models with construction kits. The colours aren’t quite right of course but by using our imagination we made furniture and stones that Neolithic people might have recognised!

Here we are…

 


Clean Water Challenge!

In their materials topic, Scafell have been looking at ways to separate mixtures. Having looked at the theory, today was our chance to put our learning into practice.

Our challenge was to take a jug of dirty water (complete with stones, mud & leaves!) and use the materials provided to separate the clean water out. Each team used a range of approaches, including sieving, filtering and decanting the mixture – sometimes a few times over – to end up with something that looked much cleaner!

Everyone worked extremely well as part of a team, and all teams made great inroads into purifying their water. Next up – why might this be useful? What situations can you think of where cleaning and purifying water would be useful?

 


EYFS are feeling frosty!

The children in Early Years have been learning about the polar regions this week and taken part in some fascinating activities including investigating how ice melts with ‘ice volcanoes’, how polar animals manage to keep warm and playing with gloop and snow dough! Reception also looked at a map of the world to see where we live and where the polar regions are in relation to us. They found out about which animals live in each pole too.


Experience Christmas

Each class is Experiencing Christmas this year with a difference. Pam has kindly organised all the usual church resources for us to focus on the Christmas story in six stages in our class bubbles, spending a time each day reflecting on the message of this special story.

We were asked to think about what presents we might give to Jesus if we were visiting him. Wonderfully thoughtful suggestions included a teddy, a precious fossil, a beautiful pearl, diamonds, emeralds or rubies, a cuddly toy, my love and a house (so they didn’t need to stay in a stable).

At the final part of the story, we laid our gifts in front of the baby Jesus listening to the last verse of the carol “In the bleak mid winter” – What shall I give him, poor as I am?

Thank you so much to Pam for her wonderful organisation of all the beautiful resources we have used during Experience Christmas.  Every child in school has been able to explore all the different elements of the first Christmas in depth.


Super suffixes

Year 3 and 4 are learning to spell words with different suffixes. They had to decide between a range of different rules that we now know.

“Knock off the e and add our ending.”

“Look for one vowel, look for one consonant, double the consonant and add our ending.”

“Change the y to i and add our ending.”

or

“Just add our ending!”

It takes a careful look at the root word and a final check if it LOOKS right before deciding what it should be!

We had an interesting discussion on why bad+er or bad+est don’t really sound right too. Super spelling work everyone and gorgeous handwriting too.

 


Rock painting in the sunshine!

Here we are, in the final stages of creating their rock art pictures. Stone Age people would not have had the beautiful sunshine we enjoyed, with only a small fire or lit torch for light inside deep caves, but we had great fun mark making with chalk pastels in the colours of rock – reds, yellows, brown, black and white.