Hello !

This week has been all about colours, patterns, black history and solving our class mystery.

We learnt about the Festival of Diwali,listening to the story of Rama and Sita defeating the ten headed demon. The children watched a video clip of a Hindu family celebrating Diwali and learnt about the importance of light during the festival. Rama and Sita were guided home to safety by rows of lamps and the lights are used to worship Lord Ganesh and Goddess Lakshmi to bring wealth, prosperity, wisdom and good health. The children enjoyed colouring their own rangoli patterns and trying to make them with the coloured sand.

The children went on to create this wonderful paper chain Diwali lamp – they shared the knowledge they had learnt to make this colourful wall display.

We continued from the beautiful Rangoli patterns to a shape pattern game on our interactive whiteboard and a shape / pattern puzzle. Nearly everybody completed both games successfully and we were so impressed with all the children’s 2D shape knowledge. We rolled our pattern work into fireworks and learnt about Guy Fawkes and made some super firework pictures too.

The children enjoyed sorting the shapes floating in the water tray and sorting shapes to find what they needed for the shape faces.

An unexpected highlight of the week was the children working in a big team together to create this ‘ pathway’ from one end of the classroom to the other. They collaborated, took turns, helped and made a super team. Well done Oak class – teamwork isn’t easy!

This week our tricky words were ‘ we’ ‘be’ and ‘me’. We learnt ‘b’ ‘h’ ‘f’ and ‘ff’ for our sounds and practised blending the sounds we have learnt previously.

A large part of the week was taken up with learning about Mary Seacole  – a black lady who travelled from Jamaica to England,  to volunteer with the nurses to help the soldiers in the Crimean war. At that time, Mary Seacole was turned away from joining the white  nurses. She made up her mind to help anyway and took a tent and medical supplies by herself to Crimea and nursed the sick and injured soldiers. An inspiring story that we have all enjoyed learning about. Look out for our Mary Seacole portrait  at parent’s evening in the hall next week! We are all so proud of our hard, careful work creating her amazing portrait.

Last but not least we solved our fingerprint mystery! Having gathered the fingerprints from adults found in our school we used our magnifying glass to discover if their prints were whorl, arch or loop prints. We narrowed down our suspects to the loop fingerprint and our detectives worked out that the mystery fingerprints either belonged to Mrs Morgan from the school office or our headteacher Mr Quinn…

Mrs Morgan was called to our class to explain herself – she did so, included alibis and was believed by our class detectives, without the need to call her solicitor!! Thankfully she was then allowed to go home! Mr Quinn wasn’t available defend himself so was convicted in his absence. Since our mystery has been solved Mr Quinn has been interrogated by most of class as and when they have seen him around the school! He won’t live this down in a hurry!

Have a great week, look forward to seeing you next week at parents evening.