What an amazing success our pyjama day was! Everyone across school made such an effort and all for a fantastic cause. The children watched videos and learnt the stories of refugees from real refugees. Their stories helped the children understand the plight of those who seek refuge and those who are settling into their new homes. We saw that a refugees journey does not stop once they have reached our shores but will often go through many more trials until they are fully settled and feeling secure. We finished off by watching a video about human migration over time depicted through story and hand paintings. It showed us how we are all connected and share the same roots. We are an ACE community which strives support those who need it most.

Well done to every member of 5S who has helped make this possible. Everyone of you is amazing and you have tried so hard. I have been in awe of your perseverance, teamwork and dedication.

The children have loved celebrating the Kings Coronation and spent the day doing different activities relating to it. This included Maths coronation code cracking, checkers, finishing the face artwork, watching short documentaries about the history of coronations and their significance and Blooket quizzes to have a competition to see how remembered the most – it got competitive!

The children loved using the poem by Zephaniah to create their own poems about a ‘Recipe for Ace’. Have a read of an extract of Ivy’s comical version.

Recipe for Ace

‘Take a sprinkle of manky nursery children

a teaspoon of berserk reception

a jug full of jazzy juniors

and chuck them all in a blender with toilsome teacher

until finally seasoning with excruciating education

Thank you to all the parents who came to celebrate 5S Arts Fortnight. The children loved being explorers, creators, artists, dancers…….the lost goes on. We centered our Arts Fortnight around our Space topic and planned performances to really make it come alive. The children memorised the solar system performance IN A DAY!! They have so much to be proud of. Our creative writing was based around creating a fantasy planet on which their alien resides, this really gave them a chance to explore different landscapes and be as creative as possible. The children were given full rein deciding what kind of planet they could create (we even had a planet, upon which was an island with a tree which gave eternal life to the inhabitants – WOW).

Well done 5S

This week we entered the season of Lent, celebrating in style with some pancake themed events. The class competed in their house teams to see who were the quickest in a pancake flipping relay. 

Through the next few weeks as we work towards Easter we will be focusing on seven habits which help us to grow and flourish as individuals: celebrating, reflecting, sharing, praying, encouraging, resting and creating. We have decorated footprints with the seven habits as a theme that runs through them to symbolise our journey through Lent. 

For E-safety week this week the children have focused on making space for conversations about their life online and looking at some of the dangers that can be involved in in-chat gaming. The children took part in a interactive live lesson by the BBC, listened to fun raps/songs about hiding your personal information online and fact-checking online news, re-designed our new desktop background and took part in an immersive assembly and workshop by Bigfoot Art Education.

Our Art project for this half term was to create a silk painting representing different elements of the Polar regions. Here you can see the children adding the final details to their painting. As a class we learnt a lot about mixing colours, using gutta and painting with precision as silk paint is extremely watery and can spread fast. The children were amazed at how fast a drop of silk paint would spread and then understood why we needed gutta to create a barrier to stop the colours from mixing.

This week we delved deeper in to our Earth and Space topic and looked at the positioning of each planet in our solar system. The children enjoyed watching the different videos which showed the planets in orbit and a little bit about them. We then created a solar system with fruit and toilet paper to show the children the relative size of the planets. The children noticed that the further away the planet the colder it was, all the rocky planets are closer to the sun and the gaseous planets are further away. Towards the end of the lesson we always have a fact finding session where the children are tasked to find a fact about our learning that we haven’t heard of yet. This always leads our discussions in very fascinating directions.

Miss Saeed’s favourite one: Scientists believe that it rains diamonds on the planets Uranus and Neptune.