Our core text this half term is The Bog Baby by Jeanne Willis.

Welcome to the summer term! We hope you enjoyed the Easter break and that you had chance to spend some much needed time with friends and family. 

This half term our topic is 'Growth'. We will be engaging in a variety of learning experiences to develop our knowledge and understanding of growth in the natural environment.

We began our topic by making our very own Bog Babies! We then planned and wrote a character description as part of our English learning. 

In Science we have planted and watered our own sunflower seeds and will observe growth and change first hand as we watch them grow. 

In Art we are learning about the life and work of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe who is famous for her paintings of flowers. The children chose their favourite piece of Georgia O'Keeffe's artwork and carefully sketched the lines and shapes they could see. 

We have enjoyed learning about the life and achievements of environmental activist Wangari Maathai in History this week. 

In Art we have continued to explore the artwork of Georgia O'Keeffe. We carefully matched colour strips with the colours found in our school planters. We then recreated the shades of colour we could see using a range of art materials. 

In Geography we went on a walk to Victoria Park to study human (man made) and physical (natural) features. The physical features we found included the Pendle Water, old trees and wildflowers and we found several human features such as bridges, the duck pond and the band stand. 

In Science we have worked with local scientist Steven Lewis Neille. We learnt all about the body structures of snails and slugs and how they use camouflage to survive. We then made a habitat for a snail, thinking carefully about what snails need in order to be able to camouflage from predators. We also learnt about the key differences between a frog and a toad and a moth and a butterfly. 

In Maths this week we have been learning all about capacity and volume. The children have been estimating and measuring different amounts of water using measuring equipment. 

In Art we used oil pastels to create our own flower artwork in the style of Georgia O'Keeffe using the skills we have developed through our exploration of line, colour and shape during previous sessions. 

Today in English we took turns to retell our core text 'The Bog Baby' to a friend using a story map. Tomorrow we will start to write a retell of the whole story! 

In Science we are continuing to learn about plants. This week we used loose parts in our outdoor classroom to create our own representations of a plant. We then labelled the different parts of the plant and talked about some their functions. 

Our sunflower plants are continuing to grow! We helped our teachers to replant them in our school planter. 

In Geography we have been developing our geographical language by comparing Victoria Park in Nelson and Central Park in New York, America. We enjoyed listening to Miss Elliott talk about her recent visit to Central Park whilst she showed us lots of photographs and answered all of our questions. We then talked about the human and physical features that both parks have as well as the features that are only present in one of the parks. 

This week in English we have been composing and performing our own butterfly poems. We released our class butterflies last Friday and watched them carefully to see how they moved. We then used floating scarves to recreate some of these movements and created a class word bank of verbs to use in our poems. After composing our poems we performed them in front of Miss Stott. She was very impressed! 

Learning outcomes for Summer 1