The Snail and the Whale visit our Dale
You may remember how much we enjoyed our Julia Donaldson project earlier in the year, so when we were offered the chance to have The Snail and the Whale visit our classroom this term, we were delighted!
They arrived at a busy time for us, and so we gave the job of tour guide to three of our Year 4s, and asked them to 'do something for the blog'. Did they ever rise to the challenge!
The following film was their creative concept; they did the research, wrote the script and prepared for the filming. They had a small amount of help with editing, and invited in a friend to help with voices at the end. Apart from that, all their own work! Well done, Mia, Kerry & Tom - a brilliant example of co-operation, collaboration and teamwork.
Find out more about Snail and Whale's adventures on the project blog:
Sunflowers
We have been studying plants... how they grow, keeping them healthy, finding out about their different parts. We planted sunflowers, and read the lovely Camille and the Sunflowers by Laurence Anholt. Using inspiration from the wonderful Kids Artists blog, we created our own sunflower artworks, and we hope you enjoy our gallery.
Here's how we arrived at our works of art!
And here's the book we read for our art inspiration...
Our Marrick Thank You
Our residential stay at Marrick Priory was a powerful and positive experience for everyone who took part. We took some time to reflect on our experiences this week, and realised how many things there were that we would like to say THANKYOU for. We considered what we had learned, and how we had been challenged. Here are some extracts from our discussions and our writing. We sincerely hope that there will be more experiences like this one in our lives, but we all agreed that this was one we will always remember.
A really big THANKYOU to the staff at Marrick Priory for making this such a wonderful experience for us all.
Thank you to our parents for allowing us to go!
Thank you to our school for organising this for us, and taking us away.
Thank you to our friends for sharing these happy times with us.
French Friends: Les amis d'Azincourt
What's it like to go to school in France?
Middleham Town is twinned with Azincourt, in northern France, famous for the 1415 Battle of Azincourt.
Have a look around their school:
THANK YOU to Mme Malbranque and the children of Azincourt for inviting us into your school. We are really looking forward to creating stronger links with you in the future. Perhaps you will come and visit us in Middleham next year!
Marrick Priory: Class 2's Awesome Adventure Part 1
An 850 year old priory in the heart of Swaledale, 3 days away from school, and an action packed programme of climbing, orienteering, low ropes, high ropes, abseiling, archery and FUN! Here is a taste of our adventure... and there's more to come!
Plant Experiments
It was wonderful to welcome research biologist (and parent!) Dr Readshaw into our classroom on Tuesday to help us understand more about our Science work on plants. Having an expert on hand was a real bonus! Dr Readshaw had designed a number of experiments for us to set up and observe over the coming weeks, so we had great fun putting those together and making our predictions about what would happen.
These are our group write-ups:
What do you think of our predictions?
Do you agree with us? Or do you think something else will happen?
Have you done any good plant experiments that we could have a go at?
What part of the plant are we eating?
We have a very green-fingered class! Lots of us grow vegetables in our gardens, and we know that plants need warmth, light and water to grow. This half term, we're thinking about what makes plants grow well, and we started off by thinking about how important plants are in our lives.
We learned the names of all the vegetables in French, too... and used pencil and watercolours to make some pictures for our quiz! Do you know what part of the plant you are eating when you eat your vegetables? To take our quiz, you need to know ...
root - racine
stem - tige
leaf - feuille
seed - graine
fruit - fruit
flower - fleur
How did you do in our quiz?
Could you recognise all the vegetables from our pictures?
What other vegetables could we add?
A surprise in the Post!
As well as the towel, there was a beautiful book about North Carolina, sent in response to our 'I is for India' post. It's called T is for Tarhole, and is an alphabet book about the state our friends the Roadrunners come from. We remember their post on the author who visited their school: http://brendatodd.edublogs.org/2012/03/07/carol-crane-visits-rocky-river/
Forest Schools in the Spring Term
We've had to wrap up well for Forest Schools this term, but it hasn't dinted our enthusiasm for our outdoor learning! Here are some of the highlights of this term:
You may recall that this term, we have been looking at persuasive writing, firstly through our posters and adverts for Fairtrade, and we concluded our persuasive writing work with a letter. We were moved to respond to a rather disturbing official notice received by Mrs Monaghan from a School Inspector, Mr A.N Gree, suggesting that the Forest Schools programme kept us away from important classroom learning, and reduced the amount of valuable time we were able to spend studying maths and literacy. An impassioned classroom debate ensued, where we looked at the arguments presented by Mr Gree, and developed our response.
Impressed by the heartfelt replies, it was hard to choose a Writer of the Week, but Thomas's work sums up the quality of this writing for a purpose. We hope Mr Gree will come and visit Forest Schools as suggested, and see for himself why we value it so!
The Tyger: Classic Poetry
The end of the spring term was devoted to poetry. We had great fun with William Blake's classic poem 'The Tyger', which we approached with the aim firstly to enjoy and savour the words, then secondly to try and unpick what they mean to us. The final part of our work was to write our own poems inspired by his work.
We started by listening, eyes closed, to the poem being read (using the i-Pad app If Poetry). We listened again, and then, listening for a third time we sketched the images conjured up by the poem for us. We were only given 5 minutes to do this: here are our first impressions. (Some of us took a few more minutes to add colour).
Next, we talked in small groups about our own interpretations, then brought it together for a class discussion, where all our thoughts sparked off different tangents - here's a summary of some of our ideas:
Following this, we had a go at reading the poem ourselves, trying to think about its possible meaning and give some feeling to our words. We made the following using Garageband - thank you Mr Salsich and Mr Eldridge for your help at this point in our project - how to get it off the i-Pad and into my blog stumped me! (the poem is accompanied by some of our batik-style artwork inspired by the poem).
Finally, over two sessions we had a go at writing our own poems, starting with basic ideas and refining and editing extensively, based on peer feedback.
Inspiration? From Pie Corbett, educationalist and author, whose basic premise that to produce quality writing we must expose children to quality literature regardless of age struck a chord with me. As a teacher, the response from the children was surprising, uplifting, and wholly rewarding.
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