Crew Robson had such a fun time on the inflatable. We work so hard to improve our HoWLs and always try to be the best we can be. It was lovely to celebrate with our peers and have fun outside!
Celebrating our HoWLs
Category : Crew Blogs
Celebrating our HoWLs
Crew Marsh laughed and bounced their way through the inflatable course and slide. We work so hard to ensure our HoWLs are of a high standard and look forward to celebrating our achievements in such a fun way! Crew doesn’t stop when we’re having fun, the children worked together as a team offering praise and encouragement to their peers who found it tricky! Especially Miss Holdsworth, she needed the crew to help her reach the top of the slide and everyone’s resilience paid off! It was such great fun!
Awesome Orienteering
Today we invited in our grown ups to take part in an orienteering challenge around the school grounds. We used an aerial photograph and control points to solve the secret message. You were all awesome!!
Our Tower
For our experience lesson, Crew Godley, we read the story ‘Our Tower’ for our new writing unit then we discussed different scenes from the book. We then made our own towers out of different resources in the classroom and designed our own towers from looking at different types of towers.
Crew Robson and Crew Godley – Music
We finished our unit on ‘Trains’ by layering up different rhythm notations to create a whole class piece of music that represented the movement of a train. We split into 3 groups, drums, shakers and guiros. Each instrument represented a different rhythm notation and we practised our individual rhythms before playing at the same time and creating a layered piece.
Expert Visitor in KS1
We were very lucky to be visited today by Geoff who works at XP. He came to show us his drone and talk about how he can use it to take aeriel photographs from high up in the sky. Unfortunately it was just too wet and windy for us to go outside and flying the drone but Geoff has promised to come back on a nice sunny day so we can see the drone flying and try and spot some landmarks in Carcroft.
Crew Godley and Crew Robson – Music
We continued with our work on ‘Trains’ during music by thinking of different sounds that you would hear on a train or that a train makes. We thought about how we could use our voices and body percussion to create these sounds.
We then practised following a conductor using crescendo and diminuendo actions whilst performing the train sounds we had decided upon.
Miss McGlone played us a rhythm using a drum and after a discussion, we decided that this rhythm could be used to represent the wheels of the train. She then used a shaker to play a beat that was twice as fast as the drum. We said that this could represent the passengers on the train jiggling along as the train moved. Finally, she played a guiro that went twice as fast as the shaker. This represented the sound of the engine. We talked about how the drum and the shaker could stay at their original beat whilst all being layered on top of each other. We listened to an example of how each individual beat could be played at the same time to create a piece representing multiple different parts of a train journey.
We are ready to begin creating our own compositions next lesson that include lots of rhythms layered on top of each other, as well as using crescendo and diminuendo techniques.
Crew Godley and Crew Robson – Music
We began our new music unit ‘Trains’ by thinking about different modes of transport. We then listened to 4 pieces of music inspired by different modes of transport. We had to listen carefully and draw the type of transport we thought was represented by the music.
We were then introduced to the musical terms ‘crescendo’ and ‘diminuendo’. When the music gets louder it is called a ‘crescendo’. When the music fades away and gets quieter it is called ‘diminuendo’. We looked at the symbols that are used in written music to show this.
We practised a short rhythm and repeated this multiple times. We decided on a visual prompt that our conductor (Miss McGlone) could use to show crescendo and diminuendo and as we repeated the rhythm, we followed the actions of the conductor to make it louder or quieter.
Crew Godley and Crew Robson – Music
Following on from our previous lesson, we began by practising our call-and-response warm-up ‘Water’, using a range of different notations and actions to go alongside them. We then looked at a short chant called ‘Blue flowing river water’ and discussed the rhythm. We then listened once again to our focus piece ‘Orawa’ and thought about the rhythm we had followed for ‘Blue flowing river water’. We talked about how we could use the same rhythm to create a chant about the journey of the river through the landscape. As a class, we identified seven key things that would be seen as the river travels and we created a short chant about each thing to the rhythm from our warm up.
Once we had perfected the lyrics for the chants and made sure that they fit with the rhythm, we practised as a class making sure we were clapping the correct rhythm as we were chanting.
Crew Godley and Crew Robson – Music
We continued looking at examples of call-and-response pieces by learning a new warm-up called ‘Water’. During this warm up we used a semibreve, minims, crotchets and quavers to represent the words within the call-and-response warm-up.
We then built on this by adding in actions to go alongside each of the words.
Once we had warmed up, we discussed a river – how it flowed, what it might see as it makes the journey from the source. As a class we decided key things that would be seen on the journey.
Our new piece of focus music is called ‘Orawa’ (pronounced Arva). It is a piece of music written in 1986 by Wojciech Kilar. Orawa is a river that flows through Slovakia and Poland. The piece describes the river making the journey across Europe and whilst we were listening to it, we discussed how certain aspects of the music might represent some of the key things we had previously listed when thinking about a river’s journey (mountains, trees and villages).
