Personal Development
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!
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!
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!
Crew Godley had a great time trying to build the tallest tower using only paper and cellotape. We worked in groups to find ways to make our towers tall but also sturdy so that they could stand up on their own.
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.
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!
We are delighted to have camps in May running Tuesday 28th May – Friday 31st May. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/carcroft-fusion-camp-may-2024-tickets-886076828647
Today, we finished our work on ‘Twinkle Variations’. We began by recapping what we had previously discussed around variations and how they can be altered through tempo, rhythm and pitch. We were introduced to passacaglia, which is a repeating bassline and composers often use passacaglia as the basis for their variations. Working with a partner, we chose a short section of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ to use as the bassline. We spent time perfecting this short section on the glockenspiel.
We then looked at how we could adapt it further. We started by changing the rhythm to make it sound like a happy, dancing passacaglia. We found this quite tricky as it required us to play at a faster tempo and required more notes.
We then looked at adapting the same section, only this time taking away the rhythm and slowing it down to create a more solemn passacaglia. This was easier in terms of the amount of notes, however, it required us to think more carefully about keeping in time and remembering to rest between notes.
Once we had practised different passacaglia options, we split the class into 2 groups. One group played a passacaglia bassline whilst the other group layered an improvised piece. The group who were improvising were allowed to make their own decisions about what they wanted to play, however, they needed to consider fitting in with the bassline, playing at the same speed as the bassline, starting and stopping at the same time, and staying within the correct pitches.
In Scotties today we had an exercise bootcamp! It was super hard work and he made us do some tricky exercises but we all persevered and completed it! We are excited for next week.
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.
