News
Newsletter for the week ending Friday 6th March
Pyjamas, speed guns, body parts and plate tectonics – all part of a normal working week here! Please take a look in Around the Classes to find out more…
Dates for the diary:
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- Class photos will be taken on Tuesday 17th march
- Over the Easter holiday there is a holiday activity and food programme at West Croft Primary School for children aged 5-13 years. This programme is free of charge for children on benefit related free school meals and in care (see here) and there is a charge for children who are not (see here).
- Sports Day Wednesday 20th May all day for Years 1-6 and the afternoon for Reception/Dolphins. Tuesday 16th June is back-up day should the weather be bad in May. More details to follow nearer the time.
Wishing you all a super weekend
From Jeremy Cooper and all the children and staff
AROUND THE CLASSES
This week in Turtles and Dolphins we have travelled to another country and we are finding out about the Savannah. We have looked at the landscape and talked about why it looks different. We have sorted the animals from the Arctic, Rainforest and Savannah. We have also looked at Africa on Google Earth. We have created sunsets cut out silhouettes of the animals.
Year 1 have been busy this week! We recapped what we learnt about maps in our topic learning and worked in groups to create our own maps of a town. We thought about what we wanted to include and what it would look like from a bird’s eye view. In writing we have been creating our own versions of the ‘What happens when’ book. We wanted to make it about something magical and the children thought of amazing ideas! In Maths we are still focusing on numbers to 50 and have been looking at the tens and ones in numbers, as well as ordering them and finding one more and one less than a number. In Science, we drew around one of the children and then labelled all the body parts we could think of. We knew so many, including lots of organs! We then had a go at labelling our own, smaller pictures.
This week Year 2 have been writing different types of sentences with an animal theme in preparation for their writing based on the ‘Creature Features’ book. In Maths, they have been looking at the 5 times table and related division facts. They’ve tried really hard to learn the times tables and any support you are able to give with this at home is appreciated. They located India and the UK on a world map for their Geography work. On Wednesday we had a virtual visit from a Muslim lady living in North Devon. They listened carefully and asked lots of interesting questions. They had a great time on Thursday dressed in their pyjamas for World Book Day. They shared lots of their favourite stories, made book marks and designed book covers.
Year 3 wrote the spooky story narrative which they will record over their spooky story soundtrack. This has been created digitally but they have also recorded their performance of their graphic score using live instrumentation which was also themed around a spooky house. Similarly year 4 created rhythms using onomatopoeia train words. They were inspired by a British Rail advert and Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “From A Railway Carriage” They recorded these vocalizations using the pulse from their digital track so the tempos matched. They will now be to include them into the arrangement. They also have recordings of their live instrumentation performances of cyclic patterns to add the into the mix! Year 6 are taking The Highwayman as their inspiration for music creation. They have composed ghostly ostinato and drones which they have layered together with drum lines to suggest galloping horses and marching feet. In singing assembly the children were singing “Fix You” in two parts and performing complicated rhythms using body percussion to “Happy”
This week Year 3 have really enjoyed their writing connected to the story of ‘Arthur and the Golden Rope’: we explored the use of conjunctions to create multi-clause sentences; used descriptive language to write a character description of Arthur and then wrote a dialogue between Thor and Arthur. In maths we looked further into fractions. We have a better understanding of ‘the whole’, comparing and ordering unit fractions and applying our knowledge of fractions to scales. In science we research the role of different food groups and which foods provide certain nutrients. We looked at photographs from Appledore, past and present, to see the changes and think of why these changes may have happened. Y3 enjoyed World Book Day and at the end of the day listened to a story read to them by Miss Truepenny. Next week the class will be cooking a healthy stir fry, taking part in an art session, having further exploration with the seaweed project and walking into the village to look at some of the geographical features of Appledore.
In Year 4 this week, we have written a non-fiction piece of writing together about how earthquakes happen in the style of our text Until I Met Dudley. The children will move onto writing their own piece of writing about how volcanoes are formed which links with their Geography topic. In Maths, we have been learning how to count in fractions beyond 1 and we have learnt how to partition mixed numbers. In Geography, the children learnt about the Pacific Ring of Fire, what it is and where it is. On Monday afternoon, the children took part in a multi-skills festival where Instow and Woolsery School were also there. It was great to see the children get involved with all the different activities and to mix with other children from different schools. The children this week also took part in some Art where they were wet felting and it was World Book Day on Thursday where we had fun taking part in an online quiz and enjoyed all things books!
This week in Year 5, we’ve begun a new writing unit on explanation texts, inspired by Wallace and Gromit’s cracking contraptions. We explored an example text and looked at the key features. In maths, we’ve been working with decimal numbers, building our understanding of place value and calculations. Science focused on the human life cycle, exploring the differences between babies and children and the stages of growth. In geography, we revisited volcanoes and how they form, learning about tectonic plates and the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland. Thursday was a fantastic World Book Day, packed with reading activities as well as a quiz! Our highlight of the week was today, when we went out in small groups with the police to see speed enforcement in action and speak to drivers about road safety. In values, we discussed puberty and the changes that happen during this stage of life. It’s been a busy, exciting week!
Year 6 have been learning about pie-charts and rounding with decimals in Maths. They have also revised some work on angles. In Literacy, they have been practising using all the skills to do shared writing. They needed to use passive voice, colons, adverbs of certainty and noun phrases. Thank you for the lovely selection of costumes for World Book Day! We completed a football themed quiz and ended the day by listening to part of Bear Rescue by Hannah Gold read by Mrs McMorine.
