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 using nouns and adjectives 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. 

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. 

We have continued to explore texture in Art this week. We will be using the skills we've developed to create a textured piece of artwork of the Whitefield Bridge, inspired by Vincent Van Gogh. 

We then looked closely at a photograph of the Whitefield Bridge and carefully sketched the parts of the bridge we could see through the viewfinder. 

In English we are writing setting descriptions of where the Three Goats and the Troll live. We worked together to generate a list of nouns and adjectives in preparation for writing our setting descriptions. 

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. 

At Whitefield School we LOVE reading so we were very lucky to enjoy a visit to Nelson Library. We learnt about how we can access books and borrow up to 20 at a time to take home! We had a wonderful time exploring the library, sharing stories and talking about our favourite authors.  

In Science we have introduced our new topic ‘materials’ and discussed the common materials we use every day.

We took part in a practical investigation describing the properties of materials. 

Thank you for joining us for our Maths workshop. We really enjoyed welcoming you to our classroom and sharing how we teach Maths in a practical way. 

We discussed a criteria for carrying out a fair test and then tested different shaped bridges to find out which type of bridge was the strongest.

This week in Science we explored a range of materials and worked together to write a list of words to describe their properties.

We then tested the materials to find out which ones are reflective.

Our wonderful learning journey for Spring 1