Wellbeing Warriors Badge Design Meeting
Today our Wellbeing Warriors had a working lunch, so that we could prepare for the WOW design a badge competition. The children will be launching this in Celebration Worship tomorrow. This years theme is ‘Walk with Joy’ and every child in school will get to design their very own badge for the competition. We want them to be big, bold and colourful. Diversity and originality are key to stand out from the crowd. WOW badges are only 3cm, so simple designs without small details will work best. The Wellbeing Warriors can’t wait to receive and judge the entries, so let’s get cracking!
Year 4 - RE: What is most important in prayer?
Although we pray at least twice a day in class, sometimes it’s worth taking the time to look at why we pray, and our current Year 4 RE unit is giving us the opportunity to explore this. This week, each group was given 18 statements about prayer and the task was initially for the children to remove 5 statements that they considered unimportant to the act of praying. They then had to choose another 5 statements to remove. The final step was for them to read their 8 remaining statements and pick out the 5 statements they considered to be most important. Each group then had to present their final 5, stating why they felt these were the most important aspects of prayer. Most groups agreed that it is important to speak to God through prayer and ask Him for forgiveness.
Year 4 English - Identifying and Discussing Dilemmas
In our English lesson today we looked at identifying and discussing dilemmas. A dilemma is a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made. We watched a clip called ‘French Roast’ where a homeless man asks a rich businessman for help. He declines but then needs a favour back when he is robbed of his wallet by a thief. The children then worked on two poems - I did a bad thing once written by Allan Ahlberg and Please Mrs Butler . Both have hidden dilemmas which the children identified. Finally we developed our voice 21 skills by rehearsing our performance poetry.
Reception: Christmas
This week we have been retelling the Nativity story. We have also been thinking about why Christmas is important. The children said Christmas is important because Jesus is born on Christmas Day. We discussed how Jesus is very important to Christians and is God’s son. The children have been enjoying retelling the story using dressing up, our small world area and through our Eggsplorers too.
Voice 21 development in Year 4
In this session we looked at what Voice 21 is and how it supports us in developing our speaking and listening skills. Building practice into our curriculum allows us to articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with others through spoken language and listening. We practised using our body language to show that we are listening, experimented with adjusting our tone, volume and pace and how to nest our ideas. We focused on learning the ‘Talk Tactics’ which included: Instigate, Build and Challenge. Through this we used diagnostic questions to develop these three key focuses.
Year 4 - Class Worship: How Do We Know Who We Are?
We had an extremely thought-provoking class worship today. We found out about Amur, a Muslim boy in Denmark, using Lyfta. He shared a small snapshot of his daily life and explored the question “Who am I?” The discussion which followed was the perfect opportunity for us to practise our talk tactics and listening skills as we shared our opinions on who Amir is as a person, whether or not we thought he was a good person, and how we could tell. There was a lot of agreement among the children with some building on others’ ideas, and a couple of respectful disagreements.
Year 6 - Maths
Today, Year 6 focused on the ability to be flexible in maths and were encouraged to try out different mental strategies to find one that suits them. We discussed that we can often revert back to strategies that we feel comfortable with, but sometimes, if we step out of our comfort zone, we can discover more efficient ways of completing a task. It was great to see plenty of mathematical talk! Well done year 6!
Year 6 - School Council Class Meeting
This morning, Year 6 took part in their class meeting and discussed how their half first term had been. It was great to hear them speak with such openness and justify what they have enjoyed, what could be better and what they are looking forward to as the year progresses.
National Poetry Day in Year 4
As part of National Poetry Day, Year 4 have written their very own poems based on The Amazon Rainforest. They developed their use of both similes and metaphors to up level their examples. We recited the poems and gave peer evaluations. Once we had finished, we wrote the poems again for a poetry competition called Wonder Verse in which the best poems are selected and published in an actual poetry book. We can’t wait to hear if any of our poems make it to publication so we've got everything crossed. Happy National Poetry Day.!