This week, in reading we looked at ‘The Harmonica’ by Tony Johnston. It is a picture book that details the story of a young boy in a concentration camp, who is forced to play music for the commandant. The book demonstrates the power of music and the way beauty can still prevail in the most difficult of situations.

In writing, we began our new Talk for Writing module using a text called ‘The Old Mill.’ The story makes use of many different suspense techniques that we are going to imitate. This week, we looked at creating tension by using empty words like ‘something’ and ‘it’ so that nothing is fully revealed to the reader.

In art, we started our new topic which is focussing on the work of Wassily Kandisky. We learnt that he was a Russian artist, who used music to help inspire his work. We listened to two pieces of music by Franz Schubert, who featured in our class novel ‘The Harmonica,’ to inspire our initial design ideas.

During our music session, we used bandlab to create 4 chord patterns using a virtual piano. These songs will soundtrack an audiobook we are going to create on ‘The Harmonica.’ We also had an interesting discussion on what constitutes music. We firstly agreed that music is sound. However, Mr Ash played John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds, which is a piece of music were the musicians don’t play anything but the audience create the music.

This evening saw the return of our Foreign Film series with a Spanish film this time – Ferdinand. 50 children from years 2-6 enjoyed the film on the big screen with some popcorn and juice refreshments. Judging by the laughter… I think we enjoyed it!

Wow – the teachers have been blown away by your projects. The ones that we have in school have been photographed. Please leave some comments with your thoughts – we think they’re amazing!

Hi
We just want to to share with you what me and Lilly have been up to this weekend.
My Mum has organised a Christmas wonderland trail in our local woods for the community to come along and walk the trail and see all the wonderful Christmas attractions then up to see the Santa.
I asked if I could be an elf on the day and roped in Lilly to help too. We took charge of an area and made sure the attractions were safe and were looking good, while handing out gingerbread man to all the children who came to see the trail ( we had over 300 children attend ). 
My Mum and the rest of the volunteer from the charity ( Moortown West Community Association) are extremely proud of the our behaviour and attitude on the day. This day included : candy cane lane , Santa , The Grinch , The Gingerbread man and Ice Queen and most of all there was elf’s helping around and also helping Santa . There were activity table and hot coco . Here are some pictures :

From ,Sophie and Lilly .

Over the last couple of weeks, Mr Kay and I have been blown away by the shoebox projects that the children have created.

It has been a real joy to see the children’s obvious passion for their topic and we can see the time and effort that has gone in to each and everyone.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank parents and carers for helping the children produce such fantastic pieces of work.

Throughout this half term, we have been learning about different types of bombs shelters such as Anderson shelters and Morrison Shelters. We used this knowledge to help design our own structures.

They needed to take the impact of a 1kg weight and also had to be water tight. We really enjoyed bringing our designs to life and also enjoyed watching the ‘bomb’ drop on to our structures as we hoped our ‘person’ would survive the hit.

Yesterday, we took part in ‘No Pens Wednesday’ a national initiative to highlight the importance of oracy and collaborative working. We started the day by undertaking a Maths treasure hunt all about fractions and undertook some philosophy for children (P4C.) In the latter, we tried to define different objects such as a hat and a table. We realised this was more difficult than we anticipated. To end the session, we created an ‘evilometer’ in which ranked different statements to decide which statements were good and which statements were evil.

In the afternoon, we worked in small groups to complete a challenge. Each group were given some tape, newspaper, two pieces of dowel and an orange. The task was for the children to create a free standing structure that was 30cm tall and was able to hold the orange. The children were given time to plan their structure which led to some great discussions. They then were shown how to use the dowel to strengthen the newspaper and created their structures.

We were incredibly lucky to take part in a musical project on Monday. Lieder is a type of classical music where poetry is interspersed with music to create fantastic stories. The session started with Rachel and Phil singing piece of music in German. Even though we didn’t understand the lyrics, we were still able to construct the story through their mannerisms and voice.

We then spoke about different musical aspects that can vary music such as tempo, dynamics and pitch. As a group, we then created our own verse that will appear as part of a much larger piece. We composed our lines to fit the music of German composer Franz Scubert.

On Monday, we were involved in our anti bullying picket. It was lovely to see our picket being supported by our Reception Buddies. We created posters and chants that showed our disapproval of bullying and allowed us to voice our message that one kind word can change the world.