Welcome to the home page for the first half of the Summer Term 2024.
Our topic for this half term is Grow, Sow, Farm. This is a geography based topic based on agricultural land use in the UK. This will involve looking at the seasonality of foods and take part in some cooking sessions. As much as possible, we will make cross-curricular links with our other subjects.
Week ending – Friday 21st June 2024
The highlight of the past couple of weeks has most definitely been our key stage 2 trip to Il Giardino dell’orco which is a working small-holding on the banks of Lago D’Averno. The focus of the trip was to learn about nature and habitats, growing foods, seasonality and cooking.
The educational farm is located a short drive from school. On arrival, we split into two groups to begin our workshops. The first workshop focused on exploring the site and learning about the different types of agriculture the farm is involved in. We saw a sheep being shorn for the summer; the vegetable growing areas and the area where the bee hives are kept. The owner gave us a very interesting talk about keeping bees and the roles of the different bees throughout their lifecycle. There are approximately 300,000 bees living between 38 hives and amazingly, each bee always returns to their own hive!
The second part of the trip involved a cooking workshop where we made small pizzas using the ingredients flour, yeast, sugar, water, tomato and rocket. Our leader explained where each of the ingredients came from and we practised learning the Italian words for each of them. Once we had prepared the pizzas, they were cooked for us.
In between our workshops, we had the chance to sample some of the food items produced at the farm. We had bread with honey and jam; a pizzetta and a home-made potato omelette.
Overall, it was a fantastic trip: it was wonderful to get outside and enjoy the beautiful environment in which we live. The children were a credit to the school as they were curious, listened well and behaved impeccably.
Week ending – Friday 7th June 2024
Welcome back to second half of the half term. We had a very busy week and have enjoyed getting back into our learning and the new routines the summer hours bring. We are continuing our main geography-based topic called ‘Sow, Grow and Farm’, but we have started some new units of learning in science, maths, and PE.
There was lots of excitement this week when we began our first rehearsals for Alice in Wonderland. We had a seated read through of our parts in the script and started to learn some of the songs. It’s clear that some children had already started learning their lines over the holiday – well done! With only five weeks to go until we perform the play, there is lots to do.
In maths, we completed a new unit of learning on statistics. Year 5 read line graphs, two-way tables and timetables. Year 6 read line graphs, pie charts with percentages and then collected their own data and used it to draw their own pie chart to represent the data. They then calculated the percentages for each section of their pie chart.
After a short break, we have got back to our English writing unit of learning based on the stunning book, Animalium. We refamiliarised ourselves with the weird and wonderful amphibian; the axolotl. We then reminded ourselves of the features of the text and began writing our own information text about the animal. The children are focusing on creating a detached formal tone in their writing with use of advanced punctuation (semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, parenthesis) to add detail for the reader. We look forward to sharing our finished pieces next time.
In geography, we considered the impact of modern farming techniques on the environment. The children learnt about some of the advances in technology and science which have lead to increased yields for farmers. However, with some of the new techniques, there are some negative consequences.
PE was lots of fun on Tuesday as two Mr Woolgars joined us to lead a cricket session! We warmed up by practising bowling and catching and then played a game of quick cricket. It was great to see some skilled play already with excellent fielding skills in operation (including a catch) and some very big hitters which generated lots of runs for the teams.
