Cultural Creative Homework
Here are just a few of our creative homeworks from this week. It is great to see how proud the children are of their religions and cultural experiences. One homework, in particular, really had us engrossed and we were keen to learn more. One child came into school loaded with two very special cakes which are a part of a celebration held yearly in France.
Kings Day is also known as the Epiphany and takes place on January 6th. It’s the day the Three Kings are said to have presented their gifts to Jesus.
On this day, the three Wise Men arrived from the East, guided by the Star of Bethlehem, bearing gifts for the divine infant. In France, it is on 6 January that the Wise Men figurines in the nativity scene are placed around baby Jesus; in the lead up to this date, they were either hidden or being gradually moved closer and closer to the stable. French people also celebrate the Epiphany by eating the “galette des rois” (Kings’ cake) ceremoniously!
The cake is eaten most traditionally in northern France and is a flat round cake with an almond/butter filling called frangipane. The tradition is to bake a trinket or bean inside the cake. It’s called la fève in French, which means broad bean. That’s because originally they always baked a real broad bean inside the cake. Now the trinket is also called la fève.
Whoever gets the slice with la fève is King or Queen for the day. They’re given a golden cardboard crown to wear all day long. Their duty as king or queen is to buy or make the next galette des rois!
Other homeworks included:
- a Scratch project
- a cultural game
- places of worship
- rules for religions
.
We Are Mindful Superheroes!
Today, we learnt a new superpower: mindfulness! This new skill can help calm us down in stressful situations and can help us talk about our emotions and understand them.
To demonstrate how mindfulness works, we were shown a bottle of water. We named emotions and assigned them to colours of glitter, which were poured into the bottle one by one. If the emotions were shaken up and not dealt with, it was hard to see through the water clearly. We practised some breathing techniques…
… to calm and relax us. As we did so, the glittery emotions in the bottle settled and the water (symbolising our thinking) was now clear!
In the wise words of Master Oogway: “Your mind is like the water. When it becomes agitated, it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.”
Creative Homeworks
Here are favourite homeworks from last week’s creative description of a new land.
Topic Review With Year 2
Written by Thomas Pace…
On Thursday, half of the class went to Year 2 and half stayed here where Year 2 to come to join us. We reflected on our topic (Explorers) by looking through our topic books (Year 5 used our writing books as well because we did our reports in them). The reports were about the Arctic and Year 2 were certainly impressed. In there we all compared Machu Pichu .We used a sheet of paper that said all the skills we have used in our topic. With Year 2, we found evidence of the skills we’d used over the course of the topic. It was great to share our learning with another class!
Anti-Bullying Dance Workshop
Written by Grace and Noorpreet…
The dance workshop, for anti-bullying week, was great fun because we got to dance to songs. Each song was written by an artist who experienced bullying when they were younger. Our song was by Little Mix (Salute), encouraging us to stand up for ourselves. Near the end of the day, we got to share all of our dances, as did the the rest of KS2, and showed it to the rest of the school.
Homework Review
Written by Lori and Nicky…
First, we went looking around at each other’s homework, which was excellent of course. After that, we watched Danny’s presentation. Then, we threw the bean bag around to see which one people liked the most.
Here’s a few examples of our favourite responses:
17 November 2017
For all children in Year 1 to Year 6, the homework this week is Talk Time and will be discussed in class on Thursday 23 November:
Which charity should our school support?
Next week, we will focus on identity, diversity and community in our Who do you think you are? themed week. As part of this week, children will think about our school charity. Currently, we support Yorkshire Air Ambulance and Leeds Mind. A previous School Council selected these because they wanted to help people, support a mental health charity and wanted to help local and regional charities. They were chosen because pupils passed on to School Councillors very clear and strong arguments.
We’ve helped these charities for two years now, so it’s time for a change. We need you to have a discussion at home about which charity would be best for us to support. We will now support one charity for one year. Each class will discuss this and then the councillors will bring the views and ideas together to decide on the charities.
Once your child has decided on a charity, make sure they have clear, powerful reasons to support their views.
You might want to discuss whether we support…
- a local charity
- a children’s charity
- a charity which helps a vulnerable group in our community
- should we ensure the new charities are very different to the current ones or previous ones?
- should we need to have charities at all?
- if your child was to set up a new charity, what would (s)he choose, and (as always) why?
Mindfull or mindful?
Would you like to find out more about mindfulness and how it can be used to support your child at home?
As part of our whole school themed week next week, all children will be taking part in mindfulness workshops. There’ll also be a parent/carer session on Monday 20 November at 2:30-3:15pm.
Please contact the office if you would like to attend.
Veggie burgers
Today, half of Year 6 made veggie burgers. Everyone found it extraordinarily fun as we have not cooked in ages! We all used cooking skills to make our bake: bridge and claw chopping methods, grating, frying, blending, moulding and – of course – washing up.
We tried out three different recipes. One was carrot-based, another was courgette-based and the final was mushroom-based. Not everyone expected they’d enjoy it but many loved it! For example, Noah didn’t expect to like it but absolutely adored it!!!
Take a look at us in action.
Adding detail
Our great writing continued today as we explored the effect of using adverbs in our writing. We finished the lesson by completing word studies in pairs on quite ambitious adverbs – but ones which it would be possible to use in the descriptive writing we’ll be doing later in the week.
Word studies are a great thing for you to do at home too, particularly with spelling words the children are finding difficult to learn or understand.
In our studies this week, we made sure we identified the definition of the word, drew an image of what it means and used it in a sentence. Then we could decide what our final quarter would be: word family, spelling practice, synonyms or antonyms.
