Book Talk and Demo Comp

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have enjoyed starting a new book in reading lessons this week – A celebration on Planet Zox. This book reintroduced us to some of our favourite characters from previous books we have read and then introduced us to some of their family. We loved being able to make links to our previous learning! We began by making predictions on what we thought the book might be about, thinking perhaps there was a birthday party due to the word “celebration” in the title. We then explored more of the complex vocabulary within the book, identify their definitions. Following this, we completed a book talk lesson in which we answered questions about the book, using Fastest Finger and Have a Think skills. For demo comp, we have moved away from retrieval as this was a huge focus for last half term and is something we are much stronger at now. We have begun to look at inference questions and learned all about identifying clues within the text in order to provide answers. We worked together to pull the questions apart and search through our books for the clues. Once we had identified these, we had a great discussion on what this information was able to tell us and how we could use it to provide a detailed answer. We can’t wait to use these skills tomorrow in our independent comprehension.

Maya Masks

18th April 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill continued being historians by learning all about Ancient Maya Masks. We learned that masks had a central role in Maya culture and that they were made for a variety of reasons – events, death and even to decorate temples! We used the information we learned to then design and create our own Maya mask.

Celebrating our HoWLs

18th April 2024Natasha Holdsworth

Crew Marsh laughed and bounced their way through the inflatable course and slide. We work so hard to ensure our HoWLs are of a high standard and look forward to celebrating our achievements in such a fun way! Crew doesn’t stop when we’re having fun, the children worked together as a team offering praise and encouragement to their peers who found it tricky! Especially Miss Holdsworth, she needed the crew to help her reach the top of the slide and everyone’s resilience paid off! It was such great fun!

Inverted Commas

17th April 2024Ruth Shields

In our writing lesson today, we had the opportunity to start creating a bank of speech that we could use in our writing along with our shoulder partners. We have become more confident with being able more the reporting clause. In our next lesson, we’ll work more independently to demonstrate our ability to punctuate direct speech

Mayan Masks

17th April 2024Ruth Shields

After starting to look at the Mayan timeline in History, we learned about the different masks that were worn by this civilisation. We learned that some masks were worn for celebrations, battle and even in death. Then we had an opportunity to design and create our own masks using known Maya masks as a template.

Our tower – where are the leaves coming from?

17th April 2024Lauren Marsh

Today we experienced the next part of our book and looked at what we saw out of our tower, we could see lots of leaves blowing from the park that is on the out skirts of the grey, dull city. We watched them blow passed us and created our own green leaf. We then made a pack lunch to take with us on our adventure to find where the leaves were coming from. We enjoyed our jam sandwich outside under the tree.

Crew Mcloughlin – Music

17th April 2024Sarah Mcglone

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.