Welcome to Cedar Class

Hello, my name is Miss Kearney, and I am very pleased to be the teacher of Cedar Class this year. In our class, we are lucky to have Mrs Slade as our teaching assistant.

In Cedar class, there will be lots of new opportunities. Although these may come with new challenges, we are always willing to ‘have a go’. We understand that everyone makes mistakes and that these help us to learn. We are all a team in Cedar class, and show respect and kindness to our peers to create a happy classroom. I am especially excited to start the year with our DT topic- ‘How does a boat float?’.

There are a few things we need to remember this year:

• PE kit: your full (named) PE kit needs to be in school every day.

• Reading: We strongly encourage daily reading at home. Please listen to your child’s reading regularly and record this in the back of their orange Learning Destination (Homework book); Please ensure that this is brought in every morning. Progress will be recorded on a display in the classroom and rewards will be presented at regular milestones through the 100 club.

• Homework: Spellings and maths homework will be set on Friday each week and the work will be due in on the following Friday. Please encourage your children to write sentences using their spelling words.

• The learning destination book can also be used for any other home learning that your children may wish to do. They will always be rewarded for this.

I am looking forward to getting to know all of you and watching you grow as an amazing learner. We will have a great time together with lots of engaging activities throughout the year.

Al Sylvester visits Newtown.

On Wednesday 8th January, we had an exciting visitor named Al Sylvester. Al is an Antarctic explorer and told us all about his expedition to Antarctica with an aim to reach the south pole.
The children listened brilliantly, and Al was amazed by the thoughtful questions they had for him.
He even let one of us dress up in the gear he wore in Antarctica!

Can you guess who it is?
 

Science

To investigate the strength of gravity acting on objects, we used Newton metres. We put five different objects into a bag and read the Newton metre accurately by making sure it was at our eye level. We have also been investigating air resistance. We created three different parachutes made out of paper, plastic, and fabric. We all made different predictions. For example, some children thought that the fabric would fall the fastest because it was the heaviest.

History

We are currently learning about the Anglo-Saxons. We were great historians and investigated some Anglo-Saxon artefacts. These included a broach, belt buckle, and a coin. We have also been learning about the crime and punishment system from the Anglo-Saxons. The children did some role-playing of an Anglo-Saxon court and made decisions about the Weregild. This is a fine known as the blood price for a crime.

Writing

We are writing our own story from the perspective of someone who has shrunk to 2cm tall. To order our stories, we created a story mountain in groups. We grouped them into the beginning, build up, dilemma, resolution, and ending. The children used great reasoning skills to determine where each picture should go on the story mountain.

Maths

At the start of term 2, we looked at factors and multiples. We used numicon to discover which numbers are factors of other numbers. We did this by placing the numicon on top of each other. If it fit exactly, then it is a factor of that number! We have recently been learning about cube and square numbers with multilink.

DT

As you may have been told by your child, Cedar class have made boats this term. The children have really impressed me with their resilience during this topic. They have been excellent at reflecting on their work, and they have been continually evaluating their boats to improve. They were especially amazing when sewing their sails. A lot of the children had not sewn before, but they all showed determination, and the final products are something they should be very proud of!

Harvest

To celebrate harvest, Cedar class made a collage of different vegetables that are harvested at this time of year. They used different art mediums, including water colours and oil pastels, to create these. The children also wrote a harvest poem. A few of these were shared during our harvest assembly.

Self Portraits

Cedar class started the year by showing their excellent art skills. They practiced sketching different facial features, including eyes and mouths. They then sketched their self portrait onto sketching paper and used watercolours to bring them to life.