This term, in DT, we will be making some bird boxes to try and encourage more birds to come into our school grounds. 

Before we can make them, we need to make sure that we are able to use the tools safely and effectively. We learnt how to use the hammers safely and then practised our skills with 3 different tasks. We started by hammering items into potatoes as they were softer than the wood we will be using. We started with a long golf tee before moving on to a shorter one and then tried with a long nail. We tried both hammering the items in and also using the claw to remove the items.

The Year 1's had the added challenge of looking at the parts that would make up our bird boxes and seeing if they could work out where each piece would go. 

Now that we have mastered the skills, we will be able to work together to make our bird boxes.

This term, in art, the children in Cherry and Oak have been learning about the jungles of Henri Rousseau. We explored his painting 'Surprised- Tiger in a Tropical Storm' and found out that he had never visited a jungle in real life or seen a real tiger. He used his imagination to create his landscape paintings. 

We learnt how to mix the powder paints correctly and how to clean up after ourselves. At the end of our unit of work, we all worked together to create a large imaginary jungle of our own. We started by mixing the different paints we would need for our background. The Year 2's used the primary colours to mix green paint for the leaf part of the picture, the Year 1's used black and white to mix grey for the stormy part of the sky and the Reception children prepared the blue paint for the sunny sky before the storm arrived. The children then worked in teams to paint the paper for the background. 

Once the background was ready, we used the large paper to create plants and animals that we then used to collage onto our background. We talked about how we could layer up our pieces to make it look more realistic and then placed our paper shapes onto our background. 

Once we were happy with our design, we gathered for our final photograph.