As part of this half-term’s “Let’s Celebrate” topic, Flamingo Class have enjoyed a week learning about and celebrating Bonfire Night! We explored the occasion’s history and traditions, in order to understand why this event has become such a popular celebration in Britain. Read on to find out more about our Design & Technology task to create a life-sized Guy Fawkes and to see photos of Bonfire Night, Turks and Caicos Style!

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As a culmination of all the events in our Keeping Healthy week, Years 3-6 set off for Sports Day at the Athletics track! All children competed in teams, collecting the greatest score possible for their groups by either running, jumping or throwing for victory! After developing our Athletics skills throughout the past 6 weeks, the children were able to show off their newly acquired skills in the hurdles, long jump, triple jump, discus, javelin, and shot put.

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Over the past few weeks, Flamingo Class have been researching what life was like for sailors on board a Tudor Explorer’s ship. We expected to hear stories of great discoveries and valuable treasure…we were in for a shock! Life on board a Tudor Ship could be awful! Tales of scrubbing the deck, sitting for hours in the Crow’s Nest, being locked up ‘In Irons’ and getting ill with scurvy was not what we had in mind!

We used all the evidence from our research to write a Ship’s Log from the point of view of an ordinary Tudor sailor. They tell the real story of life aboard a ship…battles with enemy ships, harsh punishments for drinking too much rum, eating mouldy fruit and being very, very tired! You’ll find them all in our accounts of life at sea!

When we had completed our Ship’s Log, we had a lot of fun ageing them. Anyone would think they really were 500 years old!  Pop by our class to take a look and see some photos here:  yr-4-ships-log-photos

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Mr Toby set us a rather odd challenge this week!  He told us that, on his daring voyages around the world, the famous Tudor Explorer Sir Walter Raleigh insisted on drinking piping hot tea!  The only problem was, he would never drink his tea right away…apparently he was too busy searching for new land, fighting with Spanish ships or just showing off his fine Tudor clothes! By the time he came to drink his tea, it would be cold!

We worked together to plan a fair test, so that we could compare how well different materials kept the tea hot over time.  Read on to learn more about our experiment and to see more photos.

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As part of our art project, we set ourselves the challenge of building a huge ocean mural directly onto our Tudor topic display board. In order to decide how to lay out our mural, we looked at a range of artworks from all around the world. Then, we used all of our cooperation and communication skills to organise ourselves into teams, so that we could work effectively together. Once prepared, the fun began! We pasted torn strips of paper onto the board using glue, layering each colour to create the impression of crashing waves. In just over an hour, with our hands and fingers thoroughly stuck together, we could step back and enjoy our creation! Read on to see more photos of us working together on this project and the finished mural.  We hope you like it as much as we do – please call by the Flamingo classroom to take a look for yourselves at the real thing.

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the Flamingo Classroom! To introduce our topic on Tudor Explorers, we have been thinking about life on the ocean in many aspects of our learning. In our Literacy work, we have used ‘The breaking wave of Kanagawa’ by Katsushika Hokusai to inspire poetry writing.   Throughout the opening weeks, we have been exploring how to use word and phrases to create moods, sounds and images in our reader’s imagination. To get our own imagination working hard, we re-created the sounds of a tempest using only a few musical instruments and our own voices. This ‘soundscape’ helped us to experience the storm. It actually sounded quite frightening! Fortunately, it also gave us some excellent ideas for our writing!  Come and read our poems, displayed on our Storm Mural in our class.