Summer

We are HoopStarz!

Tracey from Hoopstarz visited school this week to work on our hula hooping skills. We practised the correct technique with Tracey then tried some more difficult moves like turning, jumping and criss-crossing our feet while hula hooping. We amazed ourselves when we realised that we could do it! How talented are we? Tracey was very proud of us all.

Pirate School

We had an amazing time at 'Pirate School' at the Rising Sun Country Park. We used treasure maps to follow a trail through the fields which led us to hidden clues. We then had to use the clues to find the code which would open the wooden treasure chest in as little time as possible. What great fun we had outdoors in the sunshine! After lunch, we got creative! We used fallen branches, sticks, twigs and leaves to make pirate dens in the woodland. We worked in teams to make the best dens we could. Our grown-ups were so impressed with us, they said we were just as skilled as real pirates! What a fun-packed day we all had, some of us were so exhausted from all the excitement that we fell asleep on the coach journey back to school. It's hard work being a pirate!

Our trip to Scotswood Nature Community Garden

What an amazing day we had with at Scotswood Garden. We spent a whole day learning about plants! We know what they need to survive, the names of common plants found in our local area, the different parts of a flowering plant, the importance of bees and at the end of the day, we planted our very own seeds to bring back to school to take care over the coming months. What a busy but exciting day we all had!

Message in a bottle

We loved reading the story of ‘The Pirates Next Door’ by Jonny Duddle. We learned lots of pirate sayings and found out what pirates liked to do. We know that they would send messages to each other in bottles across the seven seas. We have written fictional messages from Tilda to Jim Lad. Some of our work is shown below.

The King’s Coronation

As part of our celebrations for King Charles III Coronation, today we enjoyed coming to school in red, white and blue and completed lots of fun activities in the classroom. We made and decorated paper crowns, we made Union Jack flags and we found out about the all the celebrations that will be taking place over this special bank holiday weekend.

Animal Pageant
This week Steve from the Newcastle Music Service was back in school. He was working with Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 on a project called Animal Pageant. This involves using djembe drums which we have discovered is great fun! During our first lesson, we danced around the hall to the beat of the drum and we learned different ways to play the drum using the names and actions of different African animals.

Sunderland Lifeboat Station

We absolutely loved our trip to the RNLI Station at Sunderland. Did you know that this station is the oldest lifeboat station, celebrating over 200 years of support for its community? We met Dennis and Alex who showed us around their fantastic site. We learned about the different types of lifeboats which they have at the station and all the training and hard work which goes into becoming a lifeguard. We tried on helmets and lifejackets and we got to sit in one or two of the lifeboats which was really exciting! How things have changed since Grace Darling rescued nine stranded survivors of the steamship Forfarshire in 1838 in her coble boat.

Pop Art

We have studied Pop Art and some of the artwork from famous artists like Andy Warhol. We know that pop art is bold, bright and eye-catching and that many pop artists used repetition in their work. We know how to make secondary colours by mixing primary colours together, we know that some colours complement each other through studying a colour wheel and we know that pop artists often chose to create art using everyday objects and portraits of famous people. We decided to produce self-portraits in the style of Andy Warhol using repetition and complementary colours.

Researching pop art by Andy Warhol and colour mixing