Pre-Prep: Autumn Adventures
There has been an autumnal feel in the Pre-Prep, with the drop in temperature and the rainy weather. However, this did not dampen our spirits. The children were out picking vegetables in the Walled Garden and running around in their waterproofs at break time. In Outdoor Education the children have also been learning about seasons and how life outside changes. They have picked fruit and worked very well in teams. They went on a beach walk looking at the different types of rocks and hunting for fossils.
Form 6
In Form 6, the children have been getting stuck into their statistics lessons, learning all about tally and bar charts. We have been working on drawing bar charts accurately and learning how to interpret them. Computer Science has seen the children learning how computers are connected on networks.
In Art, they have been completing maps of the school in black and white, inspired by Jane Hyslop’s prints, using collage, drawing and some press printing and, in DT, they have chosen their favourite logo designs and are beginning to make these using cut paper. Form 6 are also involved in producing drawings of the school and the surrounding landscape for a toy box project with the wood worker Marion Makes.
The children have continued their exploration of 'the box ' and improvisation in Drama and we also started work on the Christmas Nativity!! We have been devising character ideas for their production.
I have so enjoyed listening to Form 6 singing Frère Jacque in a round this fortnight - an exercise to help them understand minims and crotchets. The sound was quite amazing! Well done!
Form 7
Form 7 have been embracing all things ‘autumn’ in the last fortnight. We went on a very successful conker hunt around the school grounds and turned our experience into Haiku poems.
In Science, we learnt why apples turn brown and experimented with different products to see what best prevents this process from happening. It turned out that while salt was the most effective product, honey was in fact a must taste second place option!
This week we have been learning about Scottish colourist painters. We considered how warm colours and cold colours are used to separate the foreground from the background and began our own landscape/ seascape pictures. Continuing with an artist theme, Form 7 wrote their first rhyming poems about a lost pets and even managed to include rhyming couplets!
In Music with Miss Lloyd, Form 7 are doing brilliantly with keeping a steady beat, and this week they used Miss Lloyd’s favourite resource (inflatable jumbo tennis balls) to help get the physical feeling of creating a pulse by bouncing the ball to a partner. We have started the challenging task of alternating between keeping a beat and clapping a rhythm using Old Mr Woodpecker. I promise to try to find songs involving wolves, owls and lions to make it fair to the other patrols!
Form 8
Form 8 have been learning more sounds. We now know m,a,s,d,t as well as lots of tricky words and are writing simple sentences such as ‘I am mad’ or ‘pat the mat’. We are also working on number formation as well as counting forwards and backwards within ten. This is building our ability to take on some addition and subtraction sums in the not-too-distant future!
We have really enjoyed learning about what technology is and using our iPad to start collecting our evidence of learning by taking photos of jobs that we have done independently.
Our Scotland topic has been a huge hit! We have been listening to Julia Donaldson stories and we even drew The Gruffalo. The best part so far was our science lesson when we made a volcano explode. We have also been focussing on The Black Watch play in drama by pretending that we are soldiers and practising some mime.
In Music with Miss Lloyd, Form 8 are working on the different feeling between stepping a fast and a slow beat and we’re finding that a slow beat is much harder! Songs which use the Lycra are still a firm favourite especially Five Fat Peas and Three Teddies on a Trampoline. This group is getting better and better at passing a ‘hot potato’ around the circle in time to a steady beat. We hope to perform this skill to you one day!
