We had a great community meeting this morning. We thought really hard about resilience and bravery particularly when it comes to completing beautiful work that we might find tricky.
We listened to the story called The Dot about a little girl called Vashti who found art difficult but worked hard and succeeded. We all got a dot of our very own to create our own mini piece of art work which we put together to make our very own dotty masterpiece.
We finished our community meeting with crew champions – we are really proud of all of you.
Our KS1 crews took part in a Humpty Dumpty crew challenge to mark our Norton Campus science week. We investigated materials to see which one would make the best jacket to protect Humpty Dumpty when he fell from the wall. After investigating the materials we voted for the ones we thought would offer the most protection. We also discussed how we could make the test fair and made predictions for the results.
In Crew Goodyer this week, Class 6 brought their Somebody Swallowed Stanley work in to share with Class 5. Class 6 were so proud to share their character plans, story maps and read their alternative stories aloud confidently. Class 5 offered some great critique, praising their crew mates and sharing ideas for how to make their work better.
We started our week off sharing some fantastic beautiful work and handing out some certificates to children who are working incredibly hard or are showing they are great members of our Norton crew.
We had a focus on mental health in our assembly this morning. We thought about who we could talk to if we were struggling and we made pledges of something we would do this weekend to make our minds happy.
I can’t wait to hear about what you did next week!
The week commencing 05/02/24 Nursery were exploring their latest text within our expedition Once upon a Time – Who is hiding in the pages of this book? We were looking a comparison of the traditional tale of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, through a text titled “Goldy Luck and the Three Pandas” by Natasha Yim. This story is a celebration of oriental culture made accessible to children through a traditional tale. The Children really enjoyed learning about the differences between the bears in the story, Goldy Luck and Goldilocks and the Chinese culture overall, which made great links for the celebration of Chinese New Year.
Goldy Luck, Mr and Mrs Chen had rice porridge known as Congee in their adaptation of the story, so the children played and investigated rice in the sensory tray. They filled red containers and and practised picking up Pom poms with chop sticks building their fine motor skills in our finger gym.
We then researched Panda Bears by looking at non fiction texts in our Tuesday Reading Crew using the text “ A Book of Bears” by Katie Viggers. The children learned where Pandas come from, where they live, what they eat and what they look like. We used this information and other stimulus to produce beautiful artwork of Panda faces.
Children experimented with Chinese dining within our role play area, sitting on floor cushions and using tweezers and chop sticks to eat pretend noodles in their role play. Nursery also had a Chinese food tasting crew on Thoughtful Thursday, during which they tried a number of new foods including noodles, Sweet and Sour Sauce and Prawn Crackers. Most of the children liked the noodles 🍜 and had second helpings. Some of the words used to describe the sweet and sour sauce were “Spicy”, “Tingly”, “Sweet” and “Hot”.
Nursery explored traditional Chinese dress and took part in their own traditional street parade. The children split into two groups and played a range of instruments and took turns to march and dance, exploring various levels in pairs using Chinese dragons. What beautiful work they produced!
Throughout the week children created various paintings of a Chinese theme including dragons and lanterns as it is officially the year of the dragon, 2024. This got us thinking about the year of the children’s birth which was for most the year of the Rat or some the year of the Ox. We watched of short video/puppet show about the ancient myth of how the Chinese calendar came to exist and the order of the animals by year. The children took part in an online tutorial modelled by myself to draw a rat 🐀, representing the year of their birth. The results were awesome, we have some budding artists.
