Lewes New School Blog

Lots in the pot this week! . . .

11.6.10

In the Nursery we started the week by re-visiting a question from last half term, “What kind of things do you find on trees?” We used the answers to create pieces of art work to put up on our tree collage.

On Tuesday we read the story of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, which led to us finding different ways to make ‘beautiful butterflies’. Our pet caterpillar, Cittypilly, was well looked after by Iola and her family over the holiday, it has now formed a cocoon in between two of the leaves which means it’s hard for us to see what is going on but by this time next week we will hopefully see our caterpillar emerge as a butterfly.

Alongside this Sol wanted to use the printing rollers to make a large picture, Loui wanted to play pirates so they worked together, along with Rudi, to paint a large picture of the sea with a pirate ship on it. We also followed up a suggestion from Laurie to make smoothies.

***

This week in Class 1 the children and adults have been positively buzzing with questions! ‘How many spots does a ladybird have’? (Joshi); ‘Do wasps bite’? (Eli); ‘Can we create a garden for our mini beast drawings’? (Lottie, Isobel, Delia); ‘How many types of bees are there?’ (Lorraine); ‘Where do mini beasts go in the winter months?’ (Lizzie); ‘Can we make our paper butterflies look as if they are flying around the classroom’?

Aaron and Otis did lots of research on the internet putting into the search engine exactly what they needed in order to find answers to some of our questions.

The children wanted to make butterflies that looked as if their wings were made of stained glass. Lottie, Eartha and Will T suggested that we could use tissue paper within a card frame; the frame would be cut into the shape of a butterfly. Please come and visit our classroom to see the children’s artwork!

Some of the girls, Isobel, Madeline, Delia, Talia along with Daisy, Ines and Alissandra from the nursery, created and performed a mini beast dance. inspired by The Ugly Bug Ball (albeit a very beautiful ball!).

It has taken a little while for the children to begin to really actively consider their learning habits but I have been astonished at the way in which these very young children are now engaging with this. This week the children even asked if they could change their habits as they had thought about other ones that they felt were now more appropriate - your children never cease to amaze me!

This week in Class 2 we have been picking up our art projects from last term, resulting in several pieces of artwork including Malachy’s ‘Sunset in the Wind’, Kimon’s ‘Splat’, Elias’s ‘Black Hole’ and Oscar’s ‘Helicopter Mammoth’. We have also been creating digital art using ‘Paint’ on the computer, having fun experimenting with the different functions and learning how to use them.

We have been continuing with our times table challenge - learning tables that are new to us and memorising them so that we can recount them in any order. We are starting to get very good at this after lots of practice and determination! Speaking of determination, we have been taking the time to review our learning habits. If you have noticed times when your child has been using their habit outside of school, it would be really great if you could jot a few words down in their Home-School Notebook so that it can be shared at school.

Our science investigation has finally been concluded - we are now sure that black and white card make shadow puppets that are just as good as each other so long as everything else about the paper is the same. We have also reminded ourselves how the colour of our clothes does not affect the quality of our shadows.

If anyone has the time to make a shadow diary and photograph their shadows at different times of the day (early in the morning, noon, afternoon and early evening - in the same spot) it would really round off our project nicely!

***

David (Isobel), our resident sound engineer, has been back to extend Class 3’s ideas about sound. He’s helping us to understand how sound changes in air, space and water as well as finding ways in which we can make sound visible without using computers, and the ways in which different animals hear sound such as using echo radar.

We have been investigating number patterns in maths this week in order to find and use strategies to solve number problems and win games. We then used our reasoning skills to explain how our individual strategies worked. Some of us even managed to present our strategies in the form of an equation.

We watched the film of our dance performance from last term and we are reflecting on ways in which the experience helped us to apply our learning habits such as ‘being brave’ when we are nervous or ‘accepting and embracing new challenges’.

We have re-launched our art projects with a new sense of dynamism with themes such as ‘juxtaposition’ (Jonah), ‘Marvellous Molecules’  (Khaya) and ‘Psychedelia’  (Oscar). Some of us are also inspired by the work of other artists or cultures, such as; Escher, Keith Tyson, Jackson Pollack, Brancusi, Maori art and even studying the interior design of the new Big Brother house! What a variety…..