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Today for our experience lesson we thought about how the leaves danced past the window of the high tower. We made our own leaf and then took them outside to see how they moved in the wind.
Then we looked again at the book and saw that the children packed sandwiches for their adventures so we did the same!
For our experience lesson, Crew Godley, we read the story ‘Our Tower’ for our new writing unit then we discussed different scenes from the book. We then made our own towers out of different resources in the classroom and designed our own towers from looking at different types of towers.
In expedition today we were looking at states of matter (solid, liquid and gas) The children could explain what each was and gave a good example of each one. After they sorted pictures into the correct state of matter
Crew MW have spent the morning hooking into their new expedition – ‘What happens where the sea meets the shore?’ The day started with us finding a basket in our classroom…
‘It’s a basket!’ – Hilaryanna
‘A picnic basket!’ – Harlow
Before we had a peep inside the basket, we thought about what you might find inside a picnic basket. These were our ideas: food, a blanket to sit on, sandwiches, bananas, healthy food like fruit and veg and a drink.
But it wasn’t picnic food that we found in the basket…It was items for the seaside! After exploring what we would take to the beach with us on our trip in a few weeks, we talked about what a beach was like. Some of us were a little unsure, so we decided to make a beach in the classroom! We had sand, water in the paddling pool, buckets, spades, shells, fish and nets…it was so much fun paddling in the water and catching the fish with our nets. We loved exploring the sand too and adding water to it to see what it would be like when the tide came in!
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 have looked deeper into the Mayan civilisation and discovered that they used masks. They had event masks and death masks which were used for different purposes. Event masks were used for celebrations and special events and were vibrant and colourful. Death masks were made from Jade because it symbolises the soul. The people designed their own death masks and were buried with them. We designed our own Mayan mask and cut squares of card out to decorate it.
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.
We finished our unit on ‘Musical Conversations’ by creating whole class written notations to allow us to work in small groups using untuned percussion instruments to perfect a musical conversation. We worked really hard to ensure that everyone had a role, we even made amendments to the notations for those groups that had more/less children in them.
We have continued our work on ‘Latin Dance’ this week by recapping information about Cuban music and how it is influenced. We then practised finding and maintaining a 2-3 clave rhythm, and a 3-2 clave rhythm using untuned percussion instruments. We then applied these rhythms to some traditional Cuban pieces of music.
We practised our piece ‘Latin Dance’, reviewing the lyrics and reminding ourselves of the structure of the piece. We noticed that there were two instrumental parts within the song and we decided to create our own Cuban rhythms to add to the existing instrumental parts.
Once we were happy with our rhythms, we practised the song as a whole, making sure that we were following our conductor to make sure we kept in time with each other and the backing track.
We have had a fantastic day today meeting an Egyptian and doing a range of fun activities which have helped us develop our understanding of the Ancient Egyptian Civilisation. First, we watched a demonstration on how to mummify a body. Next, we got to handle and learn about a range of interesting Egyptian artefacts. After that, we had a question and answer session where we got to have all of our burning questions answered. Our favourite session was next where we got to play a couple of Egyptian board games. After lunch, we even got to build and Egyptian city and use ink to draw hieroglyphs on papyrus. As you can tell, it was a jam-packed day but we really enjoyed it and learnt so much in preparation for our next expedition.
