This week we enjoyed exploring the school grounds as part of our Science work looking at the classification of living things. Next week we will consider which questions we could use to sort what we found using classification keys.

The Dragonflies have quickly settled into the routines of the new school year and have made a super start with their work. We’re looking forward to an exciting term ahead – keep up the hard work Dragonflies!

We finished our canopic jars on Friday! We had worked hard and had great fun designing them, shaping the clay, painting them and adding our initials in hieroglyphics. Mrs Heath thought that they were fabulous!

Over the last few weeks we have been finding out about Canopic Jars and this week we began to make our own using clay. We started by making the body of the pot using coils of clay. We had to carefully cross-hatch each coil as we built the layers up and use just the right amount of water to make sure that the coils stuck to each other, but weren’t too slippy!

Our class challenge this term is to run the length of the River Nile that runs through Egypt. It’s a tall order, but we’re working really hard to see if we can reach the Nile Delta before the end of the summer term!

This week we started our netball sessions in PE!

We finished stitching and embellishing our artwork this week. Our designs were inspired by the shapes and patterns that we had spotted in examples of Gujarati patchwork. Mrs Heath was very impressed with our work!

We have been studying Gujarati patchwork in our art lessons and from what we have seen we have developed some designs of our own. Over the last few days we have been finalising our designs and making patterns to follow. Today we started to sew our finished pieces together…..we can’t wait to see how they look when they are finished!

Today we were very excited to have a Bollywood dance teacher working with us. The morning started with a dance workshop where we learnt not only the moves to a dance but also the symbolism of each of the moves. We then went on to find out how to wear a Sari, how to count to 10 in Hindi and what it is like in a Hindu Temple. I was very impressed with the information that the children shared during their discussions, that they had recalled from our topic work in class. What a fabulous morning – well done Dragonflies and thank you so much to Reena from Bollywood Dreams Dance Academy!

We have been focusing on independently proof-reading our writing this week in our English lessons. We needed to make sure that our sentences were punctuated correctly and use dictionaries to help us to correct our spellings.

We have been enjoying our Tag Rugby sessions with Bees this half term. This week we had fun playing games which developed our passing skills.

We have been exploring stop-frame animation this term using the i-motion app. It has been great fun developing our animations, which we based on a traditional story from India. We were very surprised at how many photographs we needed to take to make the characters look like they were moving effectively!

Over the past couple of months we have been developing the reading areas in our classroom. In discussion with the children, the books have been re-organised and four quiet areas have  been established with new lighting, cosy rugs and cushions. The children have been enjoying sharing books with their friends and taking responsibility for keeping the areas clean and tidy.

This week Mrs Heath challenged us with a giant class quiz! We worked with partners, searching the classroom to find the answers to the questions.

We are making great progress in running the length of the River Ganges and today ran our last class run of the half term!

This week we have worked hard in Maths developing our understanding of metres, centimetres and millimetres. We have also started to explore the iMotion app in Computing and over the next week will go on to develop our own stop-frame animations.

This week we have enjoyed finding out about the national bird (peacock), the national animal (tiger) and the national flower (lotus) of India!