Week 2 of our Arts Fortnight has included creating Basquiat style portraits, which we added our verse of poetry too. We also learnt how to make a title to use when creating our own prints to use in our positive slogan portraits. Everyone in 4T has also had amazing resilience and focus in learning our poem and dance. Thank you to everyone who came to watch our performance and help us celebrate.

4T have blown me away with their creativity this week. We have started learning our dance, explored the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, written our own verse of poetry based on Maya Angelou and learnt how to paint portraits.

For our shared write this week, 4T have been writing persuasive speeches as Boudica persuading her Celtic army to fight for her. Everyone has been very resourceful using ideas from our model text and toolkit to vary our sentence types and make our speeches emotive using repetition and rhetorical questions.

As ACE Geographers, we investigated the impact of climate change. We set up an experiment about land ice using ice on a tub surrounded by water. We measured how the water increased as the ice melted in our hot classroom. We also looked at places in the world already affected by rising sea levels.

After a snowy start to the year, we have settled back into school. This week we have enjoyed starting our climate change topic and learning about persuasive speech in Writing. We have ended the week with our library session trying books that we wouldn’t usually read to extend our reading range.

In Writing, we have written instructions about how to make a Celtic or Roman shield. In computing we edited the scenes from our Roman film. We have also enjoyed designing and making Christmas decorations. Thank you to all of the children for their hard work this term and all of the support from parents and carers.

Have a lovely festive break. See you on Monday 6th January for the new term.

This week in art, we finished our Roman style mosaics with everyone taking great care to cut out and stick paper tiles to depict their chosen scene. The children have also been using their acting skills to film scenes of Celtic life and a battle between the Roman and Celtic armies. In Writing, we have been learning how to write instructions based on the tortilla pizzas that we made recently. Area has been our focus in Maths this week, with the children consolidating their knowledge with some Christmas challenges.

We had an exciting visit on Tuesday from Sam the Soundman linked to our Science topic. We learnt about how we hear sound, pitch, volume and how to make our own instruments using everyday objects.

On Thursday, 4T had an amazing time on our visit West Yorkshire Playhouse to watch the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

In English, we have written our final stories using a mystery object as inspiration. I have been really impressed with how everyone has been using the language and grammar features that we have been learning about over this half term. In Maths, we have been consolidating our knowledge of column addition and subtraction and using this to solve missing number problems. Our recognition board focus has been ‘being thankful’ which is linked to the collective worship theme this week.

In History, 4T have been learning about why the Romans wanted to invade Britain and why their first two attempts were unsuccessful, before successfully conquering Britain on the third attempt. We enjoyed creating stop motion animations to show these invasion attempts. In English, everyone has been working hard to write their own version of a creepy story opening using a photograph as inspiration. We have been focussing on the 11 and 12 times tables in Maths and the related division facts to solve problems.