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'.

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 described what we could see in the painting and asked a range of thoughtful questions.

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. 

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.

This week, we went on a local walk around Nelson and created observational sketches of the Whitefield Bridge. We looked closely at the stonework and carefully drew the details we could see.

In Science the children explored the properties of materials through hands-on activities, including a blindfold game to identify and describe materials by touch, sorting objects by their properties and an online sorting game on BusyThings to consolidate their learning.