Welcome back to Term 2

We hope that everyone has had a lovely break over half term and is ready for Term 2.

Our topic this term is 'People Who Help Us' and we will be learning about different jobs that help us in different ways. In Science, we will be learning more about our bodies, our senses and keeping healthy. In History, we are learning about Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole and in DT we will be making moving vehicles.

Our PE days this term will be on Thursday and Friday and we will be doing yoga and target games.

In Music we will be starting to learn the songs for our nativity play, 'Baaarmy Bethlehem'.

We started our new topic with a visit from Molsons Opticians. They talked to us about the job that they do and how opticians help people to look after their eyes. We also learned about ways to keep our eyes healthy.

Today we have been learning about our five senses and carrying out investigations. First we used our sense of hearing to see if we could work out what instruments Mrs Hunt was playing in the box. Then we investigated our sense of sight using magnifying glasses to look closely at a variety of objects. We used a feely bag to explore our sense of touch, where we had to match the hidden objects in the bag to the ones on the table. To investigate our sense of smell we had a collection of 'smelly' pots and we had to match them to the correct picture...this was tricky! To investigate our sense of taste we ate a skittle blindfolded and tried to guess what colour it was.
Finally we conducted an experiment to see if we could find out which plate of crisps were salt and vinegar just using our sense of taste. Most of us got this correct!

Today we had a visit from Mr Jerwood who used to be an army mechanic. He used to work on lots of different military vehicles but mainly tanks. He used to drive a really big tank called the CRAV which was a recovery vehicle to get smaller broken tanks and bring them back to repair them. He has worked in lots of different countries including Germany, Iraq, the Falklands and Canada. His favourites were the Falkland Islands and Canada. He used to have to go away from his family for 6 months on ‘tours’ in other countries. Mr Jerwood showed us the special overalls he had to wear when he was working in the desert and the camouflage paint he put on his skin so that he cannot be seen by other people. We found out that there isn’t a lot of room in a tank! Mr Jerwood brought lots of photographs and things to show us.

This term, our Art topic is 'Junk Modelling'. We will start by looking at the sculptures of Michelle Reader and try to see if we can spot some of the 'junk' that she has used. We will also learn that a sculpture is usually a 3d artwork and can be found in lots of different places. Then, linked to our topic and our visit from an ex-Army Mechanic, we will design and make our own moving vehicles. We will link Art with DT, and we will design by stacking and balancing 3d shapes. We will also learn about different kinds of axles, different kinds of adhesives and how to use a saw safely to cut dowelling. By the end of the topic, we will have used a range of 'junk' materials to make a moving vehicle.

Today we talked about how our grandparent’s/great grandparent's houses looked different when they were children compared to our houses now. We looked at a picture of a kitchen and spotted some things that were different. In the kitchen there was a mangle to squeeze the water out of clothes instead of a washing machine. The kettle went on the stove and wasn’t plugged in. We also spotted a teapot. Some of us have teapots at home but we use teabags. We talked about loose tea leaves. We opened up a teabag to look inside to see the tea leaves.
We then had a look at a variety of objects on the tables and tried to work out what they were. We thought some things might play music, we thought the brown box was an oven or a radiator. There were some irons and cameras. We recognised them because they looked a bit similar to the new ones.
After exploring the objects we talked about what they were and sorted them into really old things (from grandparents/great-grandparents), old things( from parents/grandparents) and new things(now).