This week we have been very busy designing and building our own castles. We worked in small groups to gather our ideas and knowledge about the different features of castles. We used the ‘Make Do’ to build our castles, they look fantastic! We really enjoyed having our parents and carers visiting our classroom to help us with the construction. We were also researching different jobs within a castle and completing applications forms for the jobs that we would have liked to have done. In addition, we were learning about various weapons that would have been used in castles.

This week we were learning about tinting in Art. We created backgrounds using tinting before creating  a silhouette of a castle. The children also thought about the features of a castle when creating their design. The children enjoyed this learning experience and their finished artwork looks great!

This week we have been working on different balances as part of gymnastics in PE. We has a great time working with our partners to come up with different balances.

This week we have being doing some Halloween themed pieces of work. We created super Halloween poems thinking about adjectives, alliteration and rhyming. Some of the children read these out at the infant assembly this morning.

We have been learning about 3D shapes and nets, this week we used our knowledge of this to create 3D Halloween monsters. We had lots of fun doing this!

In Art, we created spooky Mummy eyes. We used oil pastels and blending to help make these creepy!

This week, people around the world are celebrating Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas!

We learned that Diwali is the Festival of Lights, and celebrates the victory of good over evil and light over darkness. Families light lamps, decorate their homes, and enjoy sweets and fireworks.

Bandi Chhor Divas is a Sikh festival on the same day. It remembers Guru Hargobind Ji, who helped free 52 kings from prison. Sikhs light up gurdwaras and pray for freedom and peace. Both festivals remind us to be kind to each other.

To celebrate we took part in a craft activity to make our own diya lights.

This week we were learning about the street artist Thank you x. We were learning about how he got noticed in the art world and how he become known worldwide very quickly. We explored how he uses colour, line and patterns in his artwork. We created our own street art for our classroom inspired by his work.

On Thursday we had a brilliant day at the Science Centre. We took part in ‘Castles Rock’ which was a great show! We were learning about how castles were built, what they were built from and how climate change has had an impact on them. We will be learning more about this as part of out IDL topic after the October week.  The children all enjoyed exploring the  different levels of the Science Centre.

We are very proud of these girls in our class. They won highly commended in our Maths Week Mathscot competition. Well done!

We have been taking part in lots of Maths Week activities this week. We have been embracing the outdoors with maths themed activities. First of all we took part in a estimating and measuring challenge to measure the height of different trees in the woodland.

We learned to play a strategy game called the “Game of Nim”, which involved working with a partner to gather 20 stones. We then took it in turns to remove either 1,2 or 3 stones at a time, with the aim of the game being not to end up with the remaining one stone at the end.

We explored how symmetry was in nature and how it linked to the Fibonacci spiral. We have created Symmetry in Nature posters to display in our classroom.

We had great fun doing the Colour Run!

Hello to all the P5B blog readers, it’s Mr Atkinson here! As you will know this year I am doing NCCT for P5B with a focus on developing Crookfurs Enquiry Based Learning approach so I wanted to give you an update of what we have been doing.

Before beginning our new Learning Journeys the class has revisited some of the Meta-Skills that were introduced to them last year such as communicating, collaborating and creativity. Recently we have explored the Meta-Skills; leading, feeling and integrity. The children have been encouraged to consider the feelings of others by discussing how we can support each other when we are upset. To help with our discussions about integrity the pupils shared a time when they were faced with a moral dilemma and explained how they managed the situation. They have also reflected on the importance of learning from mistakes rather than holding onto the feeling of disappointment when getting a question wrong. The pupils had a fantastic time applying their leadership qualities during a boardroom scenario. In this situation one pupil was late to the meeting and under guidance from the ‘boss’ the latecomer had to use the clues to guess what was being discussed – which led to some great hilarity!

We have been working on our Data Handling skills this week. We were using chromebooks to create a questionnaire using Forms and learning how to analyse the data and display it using a bar graph.  The children have had a great time learning how to draw bar graphs accurately using a titles, labels and different scales.