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.
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?
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.
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.
Today, years 5&6 had their first lesson of the year in French. We have been practising reading and writing numbers up to 100. Next, we will be recapping on French greetings, before starting our mini-topic: à l’école.
We are very pleased to be able to announce our new School Councillors for 2020-21 who have already helped lead our day of fun and fundraising for Children in Need.
Further projects this term will involve organising new outdoor play equipment for each of the class bubbles; tidying up our school grounds; and helping to organise a very special fundraising children’s raffle!!
Scafell Class have produced some amazing research on Greek food as part of their work on the geography of Greece.
Reception have enjoyed learning all about Diwali – the Hindu Festival of Light which took place on Saturday the 14th November. They learnt about how people celebrate Diwali and enjoyed trying on some traditional clothing, creating Rangoli patterns, Mendhi hand patterns and making our own diya lights.
Nursery have enjoyed taking part in National Nursery Rhyme Week this week, they have explored a different rhyme each day and enjoyed taking part in some lovely follow-up activities related to each one. Can you guess which ones we learnt?
To celebrate achieving 1000 class points since the beginning of term and the end of our geographical study of Greece, year 5 and 6 enjoyed a delicious banquet. We had lots to try including: dolmades, feta cheese, hummus, Greek yoghurt with honey, tzatziki and pitta bread. Most were even brave enough to try some octopus too!
