Windrush Valley Private School Oxfordshire – school life, this week.
Foundation Unit
This week in the foundation unit (Nursery and Reception) we have continued our learning of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We have thought carefully about our feelings and how Baby Bear must have felt when he discovered his porridge eaten, his chair broken, and Goldilocks asleep in his bed. We have also been measuring using cubes and Play Doh in Reception. The children have been using the vocabulary – longest, shortest, taller, wide, thin, smaller, and longer. In Nursery, the children have been discovering the number 4. They have been singing counting songs, building with 4 cubes and practising the formation of the number in sand.
Year 1
This week the children were asked to make either a chocolate cake or some pastry cheese stars as part of their Maths topic ‘Measuring Weight’ for homework. It has been wonderful receiving photographs of the children weighing out their ingredients and then bringing in their bakes to share with the class. In English this week we have been working on our sentence writing, building sentences using interesting adjectives and incorporating our weekly spellings. The children have been creating story boards in support of their story writing based on the book ‘The Runaway Iceberg’. This story is also linked to our Geography topic ‘Polar Regions’. We also went on another adventure to the Church. We looked at the Graveyard and looked to find the oldest headstone. We then walked on to look at the Ascott under Wychwood Long Barrow which is dated back to the Neolithic period.
Year 2
The children all loved preforming their assembly recently. They were so pleased that lots of parents were able to come. This week in Maths we have been learning the concept of addition in columns. In English we have been learning about Verbs – When did it happen? Past and Present Tense. The children have been working very hard and are looking forward to their half term break.
Year 3
We have been busy using bossy imperative verbs in our instructional writing this week. We have been looking at instructions, from making coconut chocolate balls to how to make a colour splitting disk. On Friday we wrote some bossy instructions of our own. In maths, we have been looking at data and more complex bar charts and how to retrieve detailed information. We looked at children and their lives in Ancient Greek times. In geography we have started following the exciting expedition to the Antarctic to find Ernest Shackleton’s ship…lost over 100 years ago below the ice. Using robots and helicopters, we are hoping this special team will find some evidence of this amazing ship. We couldn’t believe that Shackleton and his men lived for two years on the ice after the ship had gone down. Brrr…
Year 4
Headteacher Mrs Douglas stepped into teach Year 4 this week. The children treated her to a week of metric units of length, weight, and capacity in Maths. In English pupils finished their work on adverbials of frequency and time before swiftly on to Columbus’ voyage to the Caribbean and the different types of coral that live in the tropical waters. Despite their most persuasive writing to convince Mrs Douglas, she said that she would not turn back the Santa Maria just because of a bit of bad weather and seaweed. The ICT branching stories created in Google slides, have continued to grow in sophistication with added sound bites to enhance the graphics. In Science, we studied the differences between reptiles and birds as part of this term’s topic of Living Things.
Year 5
This week we have been reading and writing fables in English lessons. We worked hard to make these short stories interesting, carefully choosing powerful words and using conjunctions and adverbials to link our ideas together effectively. In maths we revisited converting fractions so that we could compare and order them and complete fraction addition and subtraction calculations. In PSHE we have been discussing difficult feelings and situations when these arise. We discussed the importance of expressing our feelings and seeking help and advice from a trusted person. On the sports field, Year 5 have displayed great enthusiasm and team skills playing netball and football matches.
Year 6
We have been continuing with word problems this week in maths which can be tricky, pulling apart a question to find out exactly what needs to be done. In English we began the week looking at metaphorical poems before reading a parody of a 1940s American detective story. The name’s Muldoon, Bug Muldoon. The action takes place in a garden where the exclusive area is near the bins and our eponymous Private Investigator (a beetle) is working on a missing earwig case. In History we listened to Churchill’s 1946 speech where he first used the term the Iron Curtain and looked at how the race for Berlin in 1945 set the geographical tone of the Cold War. In PSHE the theme of economics continued with the class looking at how taxation works.