English

Soar on Wings

We take inspiration from Isaiah 40:31, “They will soar on wings like eagles; They will run and not grow weary; They will walk and not be faint.” to ‘Soar on Wings’ in our school. We all worked together in our circle groups to think about what this means for us. We presented our thoughts in lots of different ways. Can you ‘Soar on Wings’?

Exploring Noun Phrases

We explored the use of noun phrases and pronouns to build cohesion in our piece of writing about Philippe Petit.

Tightrope Walking

In English, we have been reading about Philippe Petit who walked between the Twin Towers in New York. We tried to tightrope walk to gather emotions to include in our writing. Terrified was definitely one of the strongest feelings we all had!

World Book Day

Everyone in school celebrated World Book Day by dressing up as a character from a book and sharing that book with their House group. They also wrote a book review recommending why others should read the book.

Choosing Poems

For our poetry festival, the pupils learned about a range of poetry styles and explored poems in books from the library, specifically looking for poems that would be great to perform. they learned that performance poetry works well with actions, expression and intonation and they chose a poem they wished to practice and perform at our festival.

Poetry

In Sapphire Class we worked together to select, rehearse and perform our own group poems. We worked together in small groups and had to think carefully about how we would use our voices, changing the speed, tone and volume of our voices to put on a good performance! We then performed these confidently at the poetry festival and reflected on how our performances went.

English and History

We went on a class trip to Stranger’s Hall in Norwich to learn about life during the Great Fire of London. We handled artefacts from the 17^th century, took part in a drama activity to understand how the fire spread and also looked around the rooms to see if there were any fire hazards.

In English, we began the year by thinking about ourselves. We wrote about what we look like, our characters and our futures.

We used the book ‘You Choose Fairytales’ by Nick Sharratt to explore our preferences. This gave us the chance for lots of discussion and the opportunity to listen to our friends’ ideas before making choices for ourselves.

We used fireworks as inspiration for our autumn poetry. We read poems, wrote our own and then preformed them.

Linking with our geography topic of London, we read Paddington stories. We used the stories to understand and find examples of nouns, adjectives and verbs and then enjoyed writing our own Paddington stories.

Before Christmas we made a selection of Christmas crafts and then wrote instructions for each of them.

Leading up to our visit to the Hippodrome Circus in Great Yarmouth, we learn about circuses and thought about what acts we would do if we joined the circus. We also designed our own posters and described our favourite acts.

We enjoyed reading the Mr Men and Little Miss stories. We thought about how we could help the characters solve their problems.

We use an online resource called Pobble to support us to write for enjoyment. Each lesson we are shown a picture and given the start of a story and we then have the challenge to continue the story. Each time it is completely different and a lovely surprise to see what we will be writing about. One of our favourites was writing about Batman and his love of raspberry ice cream!

Each week we have a reading comprehension lesson where we read a book with a partner and then answer questions about what we have read.

After the Christmas break, we discussed what we had enjoyed in the holiday. It was lovely to share our thoughts with our friends.

Our spring poems are about the natural world. We listened carefully to each poem and chose parts that we liked or did not like about each poem. We are busy learning these poems for our school poetry festival and can’t wait to perform them for our families soon.

Danny the Champion of the World – Chapter Analysis

We are reading Danny the Champion of the World and to understand how extended stories are written, we have been mapping out the chapters looking at how the plot and characters are developed.