Year 5 have been busy in the outdoors this week. We have had Drama outside, looking at what makes a good friend. In art we have collected sticks and we have made some natural Christmas tree decorations for the fair on Friday night. Some children have planted up our container on the banking with Spring bulbs. Any contributions of plants that we can add to it would be gratefully received!

Year 1 have been learning about animals which sleep through the Winter, when it’s very cold. We went outside to build special nests for our soft toy animals. We used leaves, twigs, trees, in fact anything we could find, to keep our animals cosy and warm. Ask the children in Year 1 if they can remember which animals hibernate.

Year 6 children have very kindly helped our Year 1 children to programme computers using Scratch. They have been able to create moving images. Year 6 are brilliant teachers!

We have been delving into the past to find out about Guy Fawkes. We have used drama to tell the story, pretending to be King James 1 in the Tower of London; Guy Fawkes in the cellars below the Houses of Parliament, with 36 barrels of gunpowser; and the soldiers sent into the dark, dark dungeons to find the plotters. The children are full of information and facts about the Gunpowder Plot… ask them anything! They are mini historians.

As a reward for reading at least three times each week, the year twos were given a marshmallow point. This then translated into real marshmallows at the campfire. We then had a real campfire up in the woods and had brilliant fun toasting our tower of marshmallows.

The children were given a challenge to finish our  science topic on materials. They had to design and make a boat that floated on water and held six plastic people. They could choose from Lego, newspaper, wooden lolly sticks, straws and bubble wrap and then had to decide which material they thought would be the best. We had great fun making the boats, testing out our theories and evaluating our designs.

We have been using the parachute outside to develop our co-ordination skills, we have tried to keep a ball balanced on the parachute and played a brilliant game to bounce the ball off the parachute. Our favourite game is to all try and hide underneath the parachute!

We have been exploring colour, we squirted food colouring onto kitchen paper and watched as the colours mixed together and changed into new colours. We have been learning all the colours of the rainbow and have printed a giant rainbow with our hands.

Year 5 have been fascinated with the recent events in America. We watched the news yesterday morning following the American elections. As part of our ‘Great Leader’ topic, we have been outside and made our own Donald Trump. There was lots of discussion about whether he could be classed as a great leader! We started by mapping out the face with masking tape, following on from our portrait workshop last week. The children then gathered a variety of materials from the woods to make his face, using the guidelines to get the proportions right. The colours were chosen carefully, as well as looking at the texture to match the photograph of him. We all think it’s a pretty good likeness, what do you think?

The children have worked so hard on their projects and have learned a lot about trees in the UK.