It’s showtime!

Continuing our focus on drama, this week the class have been learning about how body language, posture and proximity to one another can help with indicating the relationship between characters. The pupils tested this by posing and recreating family portraits in front of the class. There was a lot of hilarity trying to identify the members of each family!  Another activity involved  pupils randomly selecting two words which they had to use as the name of their character and then decide why their new persona was famous. In groups, they then improvised and acted out a chat show scene where the pupils had to stay in character whilst taking part in a short conversations between themselves and the host. Following this, each group sent their main character to the ‘green room’ where all of the personalities had to introduce themselves to each other. At the end of the week the pupils were set the challenge to independently create a short performance of a TV show for a specific audience. I was impressed with the fantastic effort that went into writing creative scripts and application of drama skills to bring their characters to life! Finally, the children used the iPads and iMovie to edit their videos and insert additional features into their recordings including sound, text and images. I am looking forward to watching these when we come back.

It has been a pleasure teaching P7a the last two weeks and I hope everyone has a great holiday – Mr Atkinson

Lights, camera, action!

This week the pupils have been eagerly participating in activities to hone and develop their drama skills. First the children shared their experiences of drama and discussed the different types of TV genres including reality, cartoon, news and comedy. Then the pupils explored how adjusting their tone, volume and pace can help to express emotions. Equipped with this knowledge, the children challenged each other to portray different feelings during conversations and had to guess which ones were being performed. After discovering how voice actors bring to life cartoon characters, the class then made their own attempt by working in pairs to create backgrounds for some unusual people including coming up with a catchphrase and a voice for them. To finish the week, P7A have been learning how to create  ‘soundscapes’ by using their bodies to produce noises.

Hello to all the P7A blog readers, it’s Mr Atkinson here! As you will know this year I am doing NCCT for P7A with a focus on developing Crookfurs Enquiry Based Learning approach so I wanted to give you an update of what we have been doing.

It has been exciting start to the year with the children utilising their new Meta Skills of leading, feeling, adapting and initiative in their sustainability design clothing challenge. First we explored the methods of paying for items in today’s society and then the children drew diagrams of the different stages in the manufacturing process. Equipped with this knowledge the pupils then formed teams and have been collaborating excellently to combine a variety of fabrics to produce a unique piece of clothing. To help them with this they created mood boards by using inspiration from their online research and are now in the final stages of their project. The teams have also applied their understanding of persuasion to create advertisement posters for their products and have written scripts describing their items which they will read out during Crookfur’s P7 fashion show.

I would like to express my thanks for everyone who donated clothing and materials to help with this project!

We’ve been finishing off our mini-topic on historical mysteries. This week the class planned and delivered mini-lessons on a mystery of their choice.

We also had a lot of fun creating a Mayan city from Kapla. It was much more impressive in real life!

We’ve continued learning about historical mysteries. We worked as groups to explore different theories about the Mary Celeste. We also used the iPads to research what happened to the Mayan cities.

This week we took on some matchstick puzzles. We had to move certain numbers of sticks to create or change different patterns and calculations. Some were pretty tricky!

We also spent time discussing Children’s Rights and have started working on our charter. In groups we thought of how we can respect different rights and then we created some information sheets for out charter. Our finished food themed charter will feature in next week’s blog!

We’ve had a great first week settling into our new class. We’ve completed some STEM challenges, first making a wearable name badge with limited materials and then creating our dream school from KAPLA.

For information: When completing the blog I always show children the photos and get their permission to appear. Sometimes this means children don’t feature some weeks.

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