Our whole-school project this year is called Every Hat Tells a Story. During a special assembly, each class was invited to choose a hat to inspire their learning journey for the term. Class 5 chose the Rainbow Hat, which sparked our project theme, The Colour Collector.

Throughout this project, we will investigate colours in nature, art, music, science and geography, discovering how colours can tell stories about the world around us. Through creative, practical and outdoor learning experiences, we will celebrate the many colours that make our world unique and wonderful.

To begin our English learning, we listened carefully to the poem attached to the colour collector’s hat and talked about what it tells us about him.

We shared ideas, planned our writing and then wrote our own character descriptions using interesting words to bring the colour collector to life.

In Art we looked at the work of Maria Sibylla Merian and learned that she was an artist and scientist who studied nature closely over 300 years ago. We discussed how careful observation helps us when drawing.

We looked closely at butterflies and talked about their shapes, patterns and colours. The children then created their own butterfly sketches, adding detail inspired by Merian’s artwork.

In History, we will be learning about Edwin Binney and how his invention of Crayola crayons changed the way children could draw and be creative. Edwin Binney lived during the Edwardian era, so we will be exploring what life was like at that time.

To introduce our new topic, the children completed a sorting activity using pictures of houses, schools, clothing, cars and toys, placing them into Edwardian or Present Day categories. 

We are learning to observe and draw insects carefully in the style of Maria Sibylla Merian. We looked closely at detailed pictures of butterflies, bees and ladybirds to notice their shapes and features. We then practised drawing the basic insect shapes and added important details such as wings, legs, spots and stripes. This helped us to make our drawings more accurate and to understand how insects are structured.