During our expedition lesson we have been exploring mosques, an Islamic place of worship for people of the Muslim faith. We discovered that Mosque buildings have large open spaces inside, with mats or carpets covering the floor. Men perform prayers, under the guidance of an imām, who is a worship leader in the Muslim community. When women pray in the mosque, they must be in a separate space to the men. We discovered that Muslims pray five times a day and a special prayer mat is used to ensure cleanliness between the worshipper and the ground.
Today, we were very lucky to be part of a live talk with Yorkshire Water about the importance of being safe near water. It was really interesting to listen to some of the hidden dangers around open water. The main messages were to stay away from the edge and ensuring that we don’t try to go in after someone who is having difficulty. It’s important that we call for help and don’t put ourselves into danger. We ended the call with a quiz, safe to say we had all discovered so much and scored full marks! We then continued our work by spotting hidden dangers and creating water safety posters to share with our grown ups.
Today our crew challenge was the Leaning Tower of Feetza.
The children worked in small groups to build the tallest freestanding tower using only their shoes. It was lovely to see them all working together and supporting each other even if it was a little smelly afterwards!!
Year Two took a lovely scenic walk up to our local church at Owston to complete our first case study in Christianity. Along the way we ensured we were stewards of our local area and collected litter, we were praised by the public for our lovely manners and care to our community. When we arrived at the church we were excited to explore the grounds and noticed lots of old artefacts which dated back to 1086, Owston Church we discovered was also mentioned in the Doomsday Book. A fantastic piece of history, right on our doorstep!
Today we began our lesson by thinking about the school day. In pairs we ordered the events that happen in a typical school day such as reading, writing and maths. The children then added in important things like bagels and story time that Mrs Robson had forgotten about!
Afterwards we thought more carefully about the purpose of crew and what happens during our crew sessions as this will be the first section of our report.
Today we continued to be historians, exploring our village of Carcroft. We went on a local walk to see all of the buildings that have changed over time, we had a tick list to find – DFS (which used to be an old pub), Iceland (which used to be a picture house), Coffee corner (Which used to be a chapel) and the old auction room (which used to be a farriers). We noticed and wondered about how any why these buildings changed. Leo suggested that the more people lived in Carcroft so more shops were needed like Iceland and Asda.
We also visited the memorial wheel and did some sketches of it.
On the way back to school we noticed a very peculiar tree, we became scientists and investigated this, it was the workings of the processionary moth.
Our new unit of music is called ‘ Charlie Chaplin’. We began by looking at the duration of a note. Duration is the length of the note. We were introduced to quavers and semibreves and we looked at how these notes would be written on a musical score. Each symbol looked different and therefore showed us how long to hold the note for.
We then played a game where we had to create long and short sounds whilst moving our hands to match the length of note.
Once we had discussed long and short notes, we looked at our collection of untuned percussion instruments and decided as a crew which instruments we thought would make only short notes, only long notes, and those that could be played in a way to create both notes and we sorted them into piles.
We then watched a short clip of a Charlie Chaplin scene (The lion’s cage) from his film ‘The circus’. After discussing Charlie Chaplin and what he was famous for, we watched the clip without sound so that we could focus on the story being told. Once we had discussed the key events from the clip, we watched it again, this time thinking about things that could be represented with a short sound, and then again to identify things that could be represented with a long sound.
Using the instruments we had separated, we began to think about the short and long notes that could be used to show various parts of the clip whilst also thinking about whether certain instruments would be appropriate to represent certain parts of the clip.
To finish our work on ‘Swing-a-long’ we worked with our partners to move in time to the music, identifying 2 and 3-time beats. We then built on this by thinking of other ways to travel and move around the classroom (for example: jogging, skipping). We practised with our partner and then thought about changing the lyrics to match the movement. We spent a lot of time perfecting our routines before performing them to the rest of the crew.
