Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Les Musiciens de Brême

Yesterday we watched a puppet show in French called Les Musiciens de Brême (the title in English is The Town Musicians of Bremen). It is a folktale recorded by the Brothers Grimm. 
We really enjoyed the story.
This picture shows the famous statue in Bremen, Germany. We can see all the animals from the story.




There were lots of characters in the story but only one man to control all the puppets. We thought he did a very good job.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Big Wild Write

In our Big Write on Friday we wrote how we change into wild things. Some of us finished our writing and had time to read and record our work. We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoyed writing them!
Pablo
Pablo (mp3)
Maria
Maria (mp3)

Isabel
Isabel (mp3)

Irene
Irene - wild thing writing (mp3)

Sanika
Sanika -wild thing writing (mp3)

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Becoming Wild Things

We worked with our talk partners to tell our stories and then some volunteers told their story of becoming a wild thing in front of the whole class. Here are some of the stories.


Tino


Gustavo


Olivia


Jacques


Lukman

We Are Wild Things

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Letter Max Left


Dominic thought that the author of the letter was from the story by Maurice Sendak called 'Where the Wild Things Are'. It is a story about a boy called Max. We read the book and nearly all of us agreed with Dominic's suggestion.
Tomorrow WE will be turning into WILD THINGS!!!

Monday, January 23, 2012

Footprints and mess


This is what we saw when we came into class on Monday morning!

Someone or something had visited the Y2 classroom and left a terrible mess. There were dusty footprints on the desk and on the floor and the maths resources were scattered all over the carpet.  Year 1 heard the commotion as we exclaimed and puzzled over the mystery and they came to help.  The footprints were good clues. They were about the same size as our feet, so the ‘visitor’ was probably about as tall as us. However, there were only four toes on each foot.
We had lots of good ideas about who the footprints belong to. A yeti, a snow-monster, a dragon, a mouse wearing giant ‘monster –feet’ slippers, an alien, a dinosaur, a huge bat…. We came up with a very long list.
Then Mrs Grenland, who was kindly tidying up the mess, found a smudgy hand-written note. The note gave us some more clues. Like good detectives we noted down all our ideas and, as we did so, we started to piece together an idea of who had visited our classroom. When Dominic heard that the note was signed Max he had a break-through idea. We will write about his idea tomorrow. Meanwhile, what do you think?

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

African Masks

As part of our cooperation project with Le Ferradou school (our French partner) we will be working on performing a play together. It will be in French but the story is very international because the main character explores 5 different continents. Even though our performance is a long way off we are already preparing. Our first job was to find out about African masks. We learnt that they are traditionally worn for celebrations. Sometimes they are worn when performing dances. We looked at lots of examples before designing our own. Most African masks are made by carving wood but we will be using cardboard to make our masks. It is easier to cut and the masks will be lighter to wear!

Mrs Barry came to visit

Mrs Barry loves making clothes. Year 1&2 are learning about clothes. So, it was a real treat when Mrs Barry visited us and told us all about the different materials that clothes are made from and where these materials come from. She explained the process of making a waistcoat, from choosing the fabric and pinning on the pattern, to cutting out the pieces and sewing them together. Well done to all the Y1&2s for listening so attentively and for asking and answering questions thoughtfully during the session.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Questions for Woodpecker Class

This week we have been visiting a blog belonging to a Year 2 class in Brighton, England. They are called Woodpecker Class and we have enjoyed reading and looking at photos to do with their topic on London. We wrote a class comment on their blog and we thought of questions to ask them. Miss Ash recorded some of our questions and you can listen to them here.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Ice Balls

Our Science topic this half-term is all about changing materials. This week we explored ice. Miss Ash filled balloons with water and then put them in her freezer. Overnight the water froze solid and became ice. In class we cut off the balloons and inside we found beautiful ice balls.

We worked in groups to groups to observe and discuss what we noticed about the ice. There were different patterns, the outside was smooth and they felt cold and slippery to the touch. We sprinkled salt on our ice balls and we could hear cracking sounds. The ice melted quicker in the places where we had sprinkled the salt and when the salty water dribbled down the sides it cut a path in the ice which made the sides rough with ridges and valleys.

The next day the ice balls had completely melted and we did some shared writing based on our experience. Miss Ash collected all our ideas from the brainstorm on a big sheet of paper. Then we took turns to suggest ideas from the brainstorm to include in our shared piece of writing. We made it into this poem.

an ice dragon’s egg

glowing like a giant marble

fragile glass

streaked with bright rivers of colour

cracks tell us it’s hatching

imagine skating on its smooth surface

explosive patterns burst inside

an ice egg

from a frozen world

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Clothes

Our new IPC topic is Clothes. To launch the topic we dressed in something from our Home country or  from a country we have a connection with. Can you guess which countries inspired these outfits?