Christmas Cards 2020

Check out our lovely Christmas cards this year! We loved making them.

Sewing Puppets

We have been working hard this week to design and make our Christmas puppets.

We drew the design into our sketch books, we chosen the colour of the fabric we wanted to use and the colour of thread, then we chose which stitch we wanted to use from our practise session. Then we got busy!

We are super proud of our sewing efforts!

Sewing Practise

We’ve had a busy day in Pearl Class today. We have been learning how to sew. Miss Varley showed us how to do two different kinds of stitch to make sure that our fabric stayed together. They were the running stitch and the overstitch. We had pre holed templates to have a go with. Later in the day, we designed our own Christmas puppets to be made next week. Make sure you come back to have a look at our finished puppets!

Christmas Craft Workshop

Traditionally we have held a Christmas Craft Workshop for parents to come along and join in with their child to make some Christmas Crafts. Unfortunately this year, that has been unable to happen but the children still had an amazing morning getting busy with their crafts.

Christmas 2019

Christmas is such a busy time of year at school and this year has been no exception.

We kicked off our celebrations with our annual FS and KS1 Christmas workshop. It was fabulous to see so many parents and carers coming to join in with us and get into the festive spirit. Thank you to everybody who came.

Next we were treated to a special performance of Aladdin after one of our brilliant Y6 children won a competition. We loved Aladdin!

Then it was time for us to put on a performance of our own in our nativity.

In the midst of all of the performances, we got busy with some Christmas crafts and activities. Our first job was to create a puppet and we used our sewing skills to sew the two pieces of materials together.

We love our finished designs, what do you think?

We set to work to make Christmas cards for our loved ones.

Our final activity was to create a calendar for 2020.

Before we broke up for the holidays, we had time for a Christmas party and disco!

A special visitor even had the time to pop into school and say hello!

We would like to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

See you back at school on Monday 6th January 2020.

Great Fire of London TASC Project

This half term, we have been learning all about the Great Fire of London. To finish off our learning about the Great Fire of London, we used TASC to put all of our learning to good use.

In TASC, there are 8 different steps we have to follow.

The first step is to think about what we already know. We have learnt that:

• The fire started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane.
• It started on Sunday 2nd September 1666 and it lasted for 5 days.
• The fire spread across London quickly because the houses were made of wood, they were very close together and there was a strong wind pushing the fire on.
• Samuel Pepys write a diary at the time. He was an eyewitness and his diary is very important to us now.
• Over 13,200 houses and 80 churches including St. Paul’s Cathedral were destroyed in the fire.
• Only 6 people died in the fire.
• St. Paul’s Cathedral was rebuilt after the fire and the houses were made from stone rather than wood.

The second step is to identify at the task:

Make an artefact that would have been around in 1666.

The third step is to think about all of the different ideas we could make linked to the task.

The fourth step is to decide what we wanted to make as our artefact. This gave us the chance to do whatever we wanted to make.

The fifth step has got to be our favourite step: LET’S MAKE IT! These are some of our finished projects.

The sixth step is to evaluate the projects we had completed. We worked together to give each other two stars and a wish.

The seventh step is to communicate and show all of our hard work to someone else. We invited Ruby class into our classroom so that we could showcase our projects. They invited us into their classroom too so we could see what they had been busy making too!

The eighth and final step is to think about what we have learnt over the week. We have had a lot of fun being able to put our creative skills to good use and it has been fun working with different friends to create our projects. We can’t wait for the next time we complete TASC! Miss Varley has even said that we can burn our houses after half term, just like the real Great Fire of London.

As everyone had worked so hard, we sat down at the end of the week and ate the delicious bread that had been made – this was definitely our highlight of the entire week! Yum!

Boats 2018

This half term, we have been learning all about boats and we worked together to create them. First we worked together to design our boats and labelled them with all of the correct words. We have learnt that the steering wheel on a boat is called a helm. We know that boats have a mast, sails, stern and some boats have a crow’s nest.

We used a technique called critique to help us. When we use critique, we can offer our opinions and advice to others in the class. We have to make sure that we follow 3 important rules. If we didn’t, we might end up hurting someone’s feelings about their work. These are:

1. Be kind

2. Be helpful

3. Be specific

We used different techniques to help us to make sure that things were stuck on tight. We remembered that boats need to be waterproof so that they don’t sink so some of us had to protect the boats that we had made.

When we were half-way through our boat building session, we had to stop and take a look at what we had completed so far. We moved around the groups to see what everyone else had been working on. Then we chose someone else’s boat to evaluate, remembering the three important rules. Once we had offered advice to someone else, we went back to our boats to complete them. Take a look below at the start and finished products.

Sewing Skills

This half term, we are learning about how to make puppets in DT.

Do you remember our previous blog post from a few weeks ago when we made finger puppets? Click here to see the post.

Next week, we are going to start designing and making a hand puppet but we don’t want to use glue any more. We need a stronger way to hold our fabric together so we decided that sewing would be a stronger way to keep the fabric together. Before we start to design and make our hand puppets, we need to practise our sewing skills.

We learnt about 2 types of stitch that we can use. They are called the running stitch where the needle goes in and out of the fabric like this.

This is the over stitch where we need to go around the outside of the fabric.

Needles can be really sharp so we had to be careful not to touch the end of the needle otherwise we would hurt our fingers.

This task was something that we couldn’t rush and took a little while to complete but we are pleased that we showed concentration and perseverance to get the job done!

Excellent job everyone!

Making Puppets

In DT this week, Miss Varley set us a challenge.

Can you make your own finger puppet out of material?

We had already learnt about the different kinds of puppets that we could use and what they were made from.

This is a rod puppet and the parts of the body moves when you move the rods. Sometimes it takes two people to help to move a rod puppet.

This is a marionette puppet and it works by moving the strings up and down, backwards and forwards to get the different body parts to move. Pinocchio is a marionette puppet.

These are finger puppets and they fit onto one finger. We can use finger puppets to help to tell stories.

This is a hand puppet and you can put your whole hand inside. Sometime these types of puppets have squeakers in the mouth so when you press it, it sounds like the puppet is speaking.

 Miss Varley gave us some very clear instructions to help us to make our finger puppets. We talked to our friends to decide which puppet that we wanted to make. We noticed that the instructions all had bossy verbs (imperative verbs) in them that made them commands. Can you spot the bossy verbs in each command? 

First we had to choose our piece of material the right colour that would match our character.

Next we had to cut out our template and then draw around it onto our material. This would give us the shape that we needed to cut out.

After that, we had to cut out the shape twice to make a front and a back to our puppet. If we only had one piece, then it wouldn’t fit onto our finger.

Then we had to glue around the edges of the two pieces of material and stick them together. We had to be careful not to put any glue on the bottom of the puppet otherwise we wouldn’t be able to put it on our finger.

Finally, we were able to decorate our puppets to make them look more like our characters we had in mind. We are rather pleased with our efforts.

What do you think?  Can you tell what the different characters are? 

Boats

What an exciting morning we have had in Pearl class! Look at our fabulous boats!

Today was the day that we were going to make our boats. We worked together to design our boats and labelled them with all of the correct words. We have learnt that the steering wheel on a boat is actually called a helm. We know that boats have a mast, sails, stern and some boats have a crow’s nest.

We used a technique called critique to help us today. When we use critique, it is so we can offer our opinions and advice to someone else in the class. We have to make sure that we follow 3 important rules. If we didn’t, we might end up hurting someone’s feelings about their work. These are:

1. Be kind

2. Be helpful

3. Be specific

We started off by choosing the kind of box that we wanted and Miss Varley gave us lots of different materials to choose from to help us. We used different techniques to help us to make sure that things were stuck on tight. We remembered that boats need to be waterproof so that they don’t sink so some of us had to protect the boats that we had made.

When we were half-way through our boat building session, we had to stop and take a look at what we had completed so far. We moved around the groups to see what everyone else had been working on. Then we chose someone else’s boat to evaluate, remembering the three important rules. Once we had offered advice to someone else, we went back to our boats to complete them. Take a look below at the start and finished products.

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How to continue the learning at home:

• Take a ride on a boat, maybe at the seaside or on a canal boat.
• Research different kinds of boats using the Internet.
• Talk to your child about what they have been learning about in school.
• Create your own boat from cardboard boxes at home.