Reading – Refugee by Brian Bilston
This week, Year 5 have been focusing on poetry during our reading sessions. We have been using the poem ‘Refugee‘ by Brian Bilston as our stimulus.
The poem is super interesting as you can read it forwards and backwards – this is called a palindrome poem.
First, we read it forwards and recorded our feelings. We were outraged by what we had read:
“We should let people into our country if theirs isn’t safe!” Emme
“I don’t like it because it’s offensive!” Molly
“It is offensive. It is rude. And, that’s not how people should be!” Spencer
“The poet obviously hasn’t read the poem No Problem by Benjamin Zephaniah [a poem we have also learnt about this year]!” Kieran
Then, we read it backwards and noticed that our views on the poem had completely changed.
In the next lesson, we compared this video of the poem against this video of the poem being performed. We picked out what we liked and created our own version.
Ask your child how reading the poem forwards and backwards was different.
The History of Britain
As part of our time travel topic, Hobgoblin theatre company performed a play (The History of Britain) and held a workshop.
Children enjoyed watching the play and learning about how British life has changed.
During the workshop, children acted out their favourite parts from the play. Can you guess the moment in history from each freeze frame?
Village Library Visit!
Today we visited the village library. We spent time looking at the books before we made our choices. We can’t wait to share them with our friends in class.
Library visit
Year 5/6 took a trip to Scholes Library today. Children chose their own book. They are encouraged to take these home and enjoy them until the start of next half term (November).
We’ve included the library opening times as you may wish to make another visit before November.
Living & Learning
Last week, in our weekly Living & Learning session, we played a game that incorporated lots of the 8Rs for learning. We also noticed that playing the game was a form of entertainment – the theme for our current big topic (Time Travel).
The game was simple but effective. All you had to do was find pairs of the ‘Rs’. However, they were covered and we could only reveal two at a time. If a pair was not revealed the ‘Rs’ were re-covered.
After playing twice (the second time round we beat our previous score by 4 minutes!) we discussed which of the 8Rs we had practised:
- Resilience – we had to keep going.
- Remembering – we had to remember where on the grid the Rs were.
- Reflecting – we reflected on our tactics after our first game and adapted them to improve our performance in our second attempt.
- Risk-taking – we had to take a safe-risk by putting our hands up and having a go.
- Ready – we had to be ready to put our hand up if we knew where one the ‘Rs’ was.
- Resourceful – we worked as a team and used each other effectively (humans can be a resource, too).
- Responsive – we had to respond to the ‘R’ that was revealed by the person before us.
Help at home by discussing how your child uses the 8Rs for learning away from school. Also, ask them to identify which ‘R’ is missing from the list above.
Reading and maths workshop
Thank you to all the parents and carers who came to the reading and maths workshop tonight. The presentation can be found here.
Links to other documents talked about can be found below.
Nursery rhymes
So far this week, we have enjoyed singing lots of Nursery rhymes and favourite children’s songs. They seem to keep popping up everywhere in our play! Singing Nursery rhymes is a very important part of daily life in Nursery. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that young children who regularly sing nursery rhymes, will go on to develop a love of literacy and language and will become confident readers.
- In our water area, children have loved making and pouring cups of tea. We wonder if you can guess which nursery rhyme we sang as we poured?
- We’ve made boats in our construction area and enjoyed singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’. Our favourite verse is when the crocodile appears in the stream, Arghhhhhh! Follow this link and you can enjoy singing along at home too.
- In the Quiet room, a group of children noticed a very large spider hiding behind the whiteboard. We counted the legs and talked about where spiders liked to live. Lots of children enjoyed singing Incy Wincy Spider!
Exciting Outdoor Orienteering
Orienteering is an exciting outdoor adventure sport which involves walking or running whilst navigating around a course using a detailed map and sometimes a compass. The aim is to navigate in sequence between a set of control points and decide the best route to complete the course in the quickest time. Today, our children did just that and learned many new skills along the way. Here are some pictures…
- Orientating the map to north (with ground or compass) …
- Thumbing the map…
- Reading features on the map…
- Following a compass bearing…
- Pacing…
- Judging distance…
- Navigate between control points…
and check your team’s course times!
More information about further Orienteering activities and local events will be sent home shortly, so look out for letters in book bags.
Orienteering lesson
Year 5 and 6 thoroughly enjoyed their PE lesson this week. Mixing their skills in position and direction from maths lessons and endurance from PE, children followed detailed maps and used electronic ‘dippers’ to show where they had been.
You could continue the learning at home by creating a map of your house and making a ‘treasure map’ for your family to follow.
5/6M Creative Homework – design a game
5/6 M responded to our creative homework this week with great enthusiasm. Some children made their own board games while others decided to design their own computer game using Scratch or Kodu.
Ask your child which game they enjoyed the most. You might like to continue making more games throughout our time travel topic. Perhaps, you could research some games from throughout history.
