As part of our history hook week, we’ve spent some time looking at the music of War time and the importance of this to boost morale. One of these songs was We’ll Meet Again by Vera Lynn. Then we used instruments to create a soundscape of sounds from the war.
In reading, we’ve been focusing on text marking for vocabulary that we were unfamiliar with. We discussed the important of understanding the vocabulary we’re reading as this helps our understanding of the text. As part of this, we practiced reading around the word as this can support our understanding.
Yesterday morning, we visited the library so that children could select a book they could take home to read. We discussed the importance of reading the blurb to help pick books that math their interests.
Hook week continued this week as we started to explore a local artist who does perspective drawing. This is what we’ll be focusing on in our final case study. Children worked together to research this artist before we critiqued some of his pieces of work.
On Tuesday, we were fortunate to have Time Travel Education come into school to learn about different aspects of World War 2. First, we were introduced to the beginning of the war and the key people: Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. We learnt about the air raids and the role of the wardens. Then we had to opportunity to help get rid of the fire bombs that had been dropped. This required teamwork to keep everyone safe.
Evacuation was our next area to learn about. The children got to learn about the upheaved to family life to ensure the safety of the children. They packed their bags and were given an insight into rationing. We had a shop keeper and some customers who came to spend their vouchers. We’ll build on this later in the case study.
In the last session, we learned about how the Wardens would deliver first aid and met Ernie (dummy) who had become trapped in a building that had been blown up. Once we seen how to treat a broken femur, we had the opportunity to treat our partner for the same condition.
In between the sessions in the hall, we had access to boxes of artefacts which came with reading materials to help us learn about each one.
Our favourite one was as craft that had a map printed on it. Aircrew would wear this so that if their plane went down they’d have a map on them to help navigate their way to safety.
Today we used the knowledge we have gained so far on The Blitz to begin to compose a composition of music using different instruments. We explored sound clips taken during WW2, including aircraft, the Blitz and air raid sirens. We thought about the pitch and tone, selecting instruments which best demonstrated the effects. We then looked at how we can show different beats and started to layer the different parts of our composition. We have begun to put our piece of music together, demonstrating how well we can work together as a crew to produce our final piece of music.
Today in PE we developed our teamwork skills, collaborating and communicating. This was key for the tricky challenges we had to complete as a crew. Our first challenge was to ‘cross the river’. The objective was to move across the river, however, we were only allowed to stand inside the hoops without touching the rest of the space on the floor. We could only move the hoops with our hands. It took a lot of communication and resilience!
Our second challenge, the spiders web! This involved a lot of planning and problem solving skills. We could only pass through each segment once, we had to explore how each crew mate could pass through each section without touching the web. I was so proud of the teamwork and resilience we displayed to achieve our goals.
Crew Elmer have created some beautiful art work of the Sun and Moon.We have used a variety of skills and tools to produce these, including dabbing of a sponge and flicking of a toothbrush to create different elements of our image.
Today we used the knowledge we have gained so far on The Blitz to compose a composition of music with different instruments. We then looked at how we can show different beats and started to layer the different parts of our composition. We worked so well in mini crews, encouraging each other and ensuring everyone was involved. Then we all performed our composition to the whole crew 🙂 A great afternoon in MI 🙂
Thank you to all the parents who joined us this afternoon for our first family learning session of the term. It was lovely to see so many children and parents taking part and producing some amazing Van Gogh inspired artwork.
We can’t wait for our next family learning session.
KS1 Crew
