Islamic Prayer

In Re, we learned about the prayer practice of Islam. These are Wudu, facing Makkah, preparing the mind, praying solo or with others and finally recording set words. We discussed each practice and why this was important for prayer. It was great to see the children asking questions to help their understanding. We used the Islamic prayer to highlight words that described Allah. We linked this to our British Values and how we should show respect and tolerance to others with different religious beliefs to our own.

St George’s Day – British Values

On Tuesday, we celebrated St George’s Day with a picnic and an afternoon of learning about British Values.

In crew, we learned about Sir George and how it came to be St George’s Day. Then in the afternoon reviewed the areas of British Values before focusing on Rule of Law. We discussed how there are rules and law for the safety of everyone and ensure people are treated fairly. The crew shared some of the rules they have at home then we designed poster that had the expectations of our classroom.

St George’s Day

Crew Hamill loved having their picnic in class on St George’s Day! We used the afternoon to learn more about who St George was and why he was so important. We then focused on the British Values – democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance. For our activities, we had a Crew Focus on tolerance. We discussed what this meant, understanding that we all don’t share the same beliefs and values but that it is important to respect the values, ideas and beliefs of others whilst not imposing our own onto them. We then thought about what the term ‘tolerance’ actually means and identified things that can impact on our own tolerance levels. We created ‘tolerance cups’, filling our cups with all of the day to day things that can niggle us and lead to us having lower tolerance levels. Once we had done this, we thought about the things that ‘make us pop’ – those things that mean our tolerance has run out and we struggle to control our emotions. Finally, we thought about what we could do to calm our brains in these situations and allow ourselves time to top our tolerance back up.

Celebrating St George’s Day!

To celebrate St George’s Day in Crew Godley we participated in a number of fun activities! We began by enjoying our ‘British’ crew picnic where we sat together and ate sandwiches, sausage rolls and cakes. We then completed a carousel of art activities including, creating colourful shields, pointillism dragons and collage flags. We also discussed why we were creating the different pieces, who St George was and what he accomplished!

Earth Day – Seed Bombs

To celebrate Earth Day, we spent time in our XP Outdoors crew session making seed bombs!

We used flour, wildflower seeds, compost and water and mixed them altogether to create a mixture. We then took this mixture and rolled it into golf-sized balls and put them aside to dry. Once they are dry we will take some home but also plant some in our outdoor area at school. Seed bombs simply need to be dropped into soil and nature will do the rest. Over time they will turn into beautiful wildflowers!

St George’s Day Celebrations

Yesterday, we spent our afternoon celebrating St George’s Day in Crew MW! We begun the day by learning about who St George was and what he did to earn a special day in England. Some of us then decided that we wanted to make a shield just like St George had while we were in provision. We got to work cutting the shapes out of the cardboard (although this bit was tricky and we needed some help), and then decorated our shields using tissue paper, pompoms, coloured pencils and feathers.

At lunch time, we had a special picnic to celebrate! It was delicious!

In the afternoon, we chose to make fearsome dragons like the one St George defeated! We followed the steps to cut out the different pieces, then joined them all together to create our scary dragons!

Celebrating St George

In Crew this morning we discussed who Saint George was and why is is celebrated on 23rd April. We worked collaboratively to make a handprint dragon as part of our crew challenge.

At lunchtime we enjoyed our indoor picnic served in a union flag box!

Finally this afternoon we completed our St George’s Day quest. We had to complete three craft activities including pointillism dragons, collage shields and a London inspired Union flag. The children loved taking part in all the activities and collecting stickers when they completed a challenge.

What is democracy?

This afternoon, we celebrated St Georges day by looking into the story of St George. We learned that St George was a Christian who lived in Turkey. He became a Roman soldier at the age of 17. The ruler at the time wanted to punish Christians but St George stood up for them. Unfortunately he was punished for this but his bravery didn’t go unnoticed. He was rewarded and became a patron saint. We then looked at the British Values, in particular democracy. We found out that democracy means that everyone has a say and the right to vote. You have to be the age of 18 to vote but that didn’t stop us. We had 3 politicians who had a manifesto. We then went to the polling station and cast our vote on a ballot paper. Shelby won our vote by gaining the majority!