We have been learning about how music can help to tell a story and this week we focused on cartoons and Disney animated films.

We started by working in pairs to ‘write the room’ where we had to look for pictures of a range of cartoons and Disney animated films and copy the rhythms displayed onto our record pages.  Then we worked together to clap each of the rhythms which included quarter notes, quarter rests, eighth notes and minims.

Then we did a listen and appraise activity where we listened to four Disney songs and rated them on a scale of 1 to 3 stars. We had to consider how well the songs helped to tell the story and also what we thought about the songs. We all agreed that Disney songs are very powerful in telling stories.

As part of our STEM leadership, we invited Miss Hutchison’s class to join us to share our learning on Micro:bits so far.  We worked collaboratively sharing our learning and we learned from them too.

To continue our STEM learning, we’ve been discussing where our food comes from and we worked together to make some butter.  We enjoyed our butter spread on some gluten free bread.  Our follow up activity was to write instructions on how to make butter from shaking/agitating double cream/whipped cream.  It was so fun!   We used our collaborative and creative meta skills.

We’ve been monitoring the growth of our sunflowers as part of our learning on STEM.  We’ve been developing our knowledge of unit conversion – cm/mm.   We’re excited that our sunflowers are growing well! 

We have started a unit of work where we are learning about the connection between literacy and music and how music can help tell a story.

We have listened to a folk ballad, a traditional song from Shetland and two classical pieces, all of which tell very different stories.

The latest piece we listening to was ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’ by the Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg. After hearing a summary of the story, we listened to the piece played by an orchestra and then on our whiteboards we drew a picture to show what the music made us think of.

Below are some photos of the class hard at work creating their drawings and also some of the final pictures they produced and shared with their classmates.

We’re developing our knowledge of what plants need to grow.  We all planted our own sunflowers and will monitor their growth over time, using our measuring skills.  We also created beautiful sunflower art using our creative meta skills.

We’ve been exploring new hardware in the form of Micro:bits and accessing BBC Make Code software, to develop our coding skills.   We created coded sequences to make a flashing heart and then extended our learning by inserting our own code to include letters or other pictures, within the flashing heart sequence.  We used our creativity and curiosity meta skills.  We will continue to extend our knowledge throughout Term 4.

As part of our learning in numeracy , we recently worked in pairs to measure different things in the playground as well as the perimeter of the field and other areas.   We used our co-operative and communication meta skills as well as problem solving skills.

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