Crew MW – Music 🎶🥁

8th February 2024Sarah Mcglone

We have been looking at a song called ‘Shake My Sillies Out’. We have been practising warming our voices up whilst building our beat-finding skills by singing ‘Jelly On A Plate’, adding a new verse called ‘Ghostie In The House’. We had to make sure we were staying in time with each other and only clapping on the right beat, not on every word.

Once we were warmed up, we then started by learning the lyrics to ‘Shake My Sillies Out’ before adding in some actions to help with our performance. It was really tricky because we had to remember to do our actions on the correct beat so that we were all doing them at the same time. We worked hard at it though and we followed instructions so that we all ended up doing them at the right time together!

Crew Mcloughlin – Music 🎶💃🏻🕺🏻🪩

8th February 2024Sarah Mcglone

We have been having a lot of fun with our current unit of learning in music. We have been looking at the song ‘You To Me Are Everything’ by The Real Thing. We explored the genre of music and even practised some disco dance moves from the 70s. So that we knew a little more about the band and their music, we discussed information and researched answers to help us to understand their story a little more. We then looked at the song in more detail, discussing the meaning behind it. We found out that the song was released in Summer 1976, and that year was particularly memorable to those that experienced it because it was a very hot summer and therefore this song became a soundtrack to the glorious weather. We ended the lesson by getting to know the lyrics and melody more by learning the words and trying to sing it at the right pitch with the correct notes. As an added challenge, we then added in some of the 70s disco dance moves that we had practised earlier in the lesson.

The following lesson, we talked about cover songs and how different bands and artists can take a song that already exists and do their own version of it – a cover. Discussions were had around how covers can have similarities and differences to the original version. We listened to three covers of ‘You To Me Are Everything’ (by Sonia, Anthony Strong, and The Overtones) and talked about how there were elements of similarities but also very clear differences. Once we had listened to them all, we took a vote on which was our favourite cover – it was a draw between The Overtones and Anthony Strong. We then ended the lesson by looking at the first verse of another disco song ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang, before continuing to learn ‘You To Me Are Everything’.

Internet Safety Day

7th February 2024Ruth Shields

Yesterday it was Internet Safety Day which is a really important focus especially as most of us are online at some point.

In Crew, we discussed our favourite thing to do online and how to ensure we keep safe. We discussed scenarios of what to do if something happened such as someone being unkind via messages or a stranger adding them. We then identified who our trusted adults were so children knew who they could speak to if they felt unsafe or uncomfortable online.

Mindful Monday – Getting Along with Others 🧘🏼‍♀️🧘🏻‍♂️✨

7th February 2024Sarah Mcglone

This week, we looked at ways in which we can get along with others. We discussed that sometimes people may feel sad or angry but that there are ways in which we can help those people, or ourselves, to regulate. We spent some time getting mindful, taking deep breaths to focus ourselves, as well as repeating positive affirmations.

E Safety day! 🌎💻

6th February 2024Kate Thompson

This morning in crew, we looked at how we can keep ourselves safe whilst using the internet. First, we had a discussion on how we keep ourselves safe in school, the playground and the wider community. We came up with some fantastic ideas such as “follow the rules and listen to instructions” “don’t talk to strangers and people we don’t know” and “don’t use the tyres and climbing frames when it has rained as they will be wet and slippy and we could get hurt”. We then discussed the different ways we can access the internet and why we need to use it. It provides us with entertainment, allows us to communicate with others and can help us to learn new things. Finally, we designed an influencer who had a positive impact on the wider community. Some ideas we came up with were: gymnasts, gamers, fashion designers and athletics.

French – Crew Shields 🇫🇷

1st February 2024Sarah Mcglone

To develop our work on clothing items in French, we looked at how we would give an opinion. We talked about the French for ‘I like’ and ‘I do not like’ and applied this by verbalising whether we liked different outfits displayed on the board. We then began to think about our understanding of the terminology, as well as looking at applying this to writing in French. We collectively created a crew clothing catalogue and each designed an outfit and then wrote sentences to describe it, thinking carefully about whether it was a masculine or feminine word and the sentence structure needed to make the sentence make sense in French.

French – Crew Hamill, Crew Thompson and Crew Mcloughlin 🇫🇷

1st February 2024Sarah Mcglone

We have started to work on our next unit of learning in French – Numbers and Age! We began by being given a maths calculation, only it did not have digits, the numbers were written in words… French words! We had to work together to recognise any cognates or near cognates that might help us to work out the English definition. We managed to work out the French for 6 and 3 and then used this information to decide what 1, 2, 4 and 5 were. It was a little tricky as some of the French equivalents are nothing like the English but we managed it eventually!

We then embedded our understanding by playing a game where Miss McGlone said a number in French, we had to hide our fingers and once she said un, deux, trois, allez we then revealed our fingers. We were successful if we held up the matching amount of fingers to the number called out. This helped us with our listening skills.

To improve our pronunciation skills, we then played a board game where we had to roll a dice on the iPad. We then moved our playing piece the same amount of spaces only we had to count out loud in French. As an extra task, if we landed on a space where there was a colour splat, we had to say the colour in French. If we got it correct, we earned an extra turn to throw the dice! The winner was the one who arrived in the centre space first.

Crew Godley and Crew Robson – Music 🎶

1st February 2024Sarah Mcglone

We have been looking at a song called ‘Grandma Rap’ in our music lessons. We began our learning by finding the beat to the song using body percussion. Then, to help us learn the lyrics, we created actions for different parts of the song. We listened to the performance track of the song and practised using our actions at the right moment.

In the following lesson, we started by recapping the actions we had created before looking in more detail at the lyrics. We were incredibly quick to pick them up and we think that is because we created actions to help us to remember them! We focused hard on keeping in time with the backing track, and with each other – talking about how a crotchet is a ‘walking’ duration.

As a snapshot, to showcase our skills, we practised a song called ‘Hi lo chicka lo’. It teaches us all about how our voices move up and down. We added some hand actions in to match the pitch of our voice and performed these with a partner. We found this quite tricky but we persevered and tried our best regardless! Well done everyone! ✨