Grand Designs!
Happy New Year and Welcome Back!
We hope that you have all had a happy and restful break.
This half term our topic is 'Grand Designs', where we will be looking closely at buildings, construction and architecture around our local area and beyond.
We have started our new topic by looking at our school logo and discussing why we have a picture of the Whitefield Bridge. Over the coming weeks we will be finding out more about the Whitefield Bridge's construction and history and how we use it today to take us from home to school.
Our core text for Spring 1 is 'The Three Billy Goats Gruff'.
In English we are writing character descriptions of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. We worked together to generate a list of nouns and adjectives in preparation for writing our descriptive sentences.
We used our word banks to create some brilliant character descriptions about the littlest Billy Goat ...
Linking to our learning about bridges we have been looking at Vincent Van Gogh's painting 'Langlois Bridge at Arles'
We have been looking closely at the painting Langlois Bridge at Arles by artist Vincent Van Gogh and making observations of the techniques used by Van Gogh to create his art work.
We then used viewfinders to look closely at the artwork and explored the texture shown in the sky, water and on the bridge. We practised recreating the texture using a range of media by building up the colours slowly to create the texture.
Take a look at some of our final pieces using Vincent Van Gogh's techniques as inspiration.
In Science we are learning about materials and their properties. This week we went on a material hunt around the school. We found objects made from different materials such as wood, metal, plastic, glass, and fabric. We talked about the properties of these materials, like whether they were hard or soft, smooth or rough, waterproof or flexible. The material hunt helped us understand why different materials are used for different objects.
We enjoyed a wonderful visit to the Whitefield Bridge on Victoria Street. We have been using this local landmark to support our learning in science when discussing materials and their properties and we have also developed our historical enquiry skills by researching the history of the bridge. We sketched an observational drawing of the bridge whilst we were there, taking time to sketch each detail accurately.
We also visited the motorway bridge on Carr Road which was built over 40 years ago when the M65 motorway was built. We compared the motorway bridge with the Whitefield Bridge and talked about how they were built and how they are used today.
We completed our observational drawings of the Whitefield Bridge.
In music we have been exploring rhythm and adding beats to songs using chime bars and glockenspiels.
As part of our topic Grand Design we had a Lego community builders' workshop. We built our own buildings and then worked collaboratively to create a town. We had to think carefully about how we placed the bricks to make sure our buildings were strong and secure and didn't fall down.
