Blog by Bryn Thornton

This week in maths the children began looking at area. 
This short topic had them begin by counting squares and progress onto measuring and finding the area of rectilinear objects in the classroom.

Finding the area of objects takes a lot of maths skill! 

You need to be able to measure…

This week, middle school was able to take part in a very special event!

Author A.F Steadman came to visit our school! 

The children all got to listen to her tell them all about the magical world inside of her fantasy book series Skandar the Unicorn Thief, where they learned that unicorns…

Last week we began looking at money in maths. This meant we could set up our shop! The pictures show some of the children who bought items from the shop using their coins, or who had to give change as the shopkeeper. 

Middle school have enjoyed making and learning their own gymnastic sequences using the apparatus in PE over the last few weeks. 
The children have been very creative in both their solo balances and group balances.
 

In English the children have been reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  We reached the very exciting part of the story where the automaton revealed it's secret message... and it was a picture of the moon from the 1902 film 'La Voyage Dans La Lune' or a journey to the moon. 

We decided to watch…

As part of our look at scripts, middle school children have been learning and reading out scripts. 
However, this is more than just a performance on a stage... using their editing skills learned from geography last term, children are turning these scripts into short films which they are having a…

Middle school children enjoyed going up to upper school for our let's go sing practice. We learned the second half of our songs and did incredibly well for a first time hearing them!

In our science lessons this week we have been investigating conductors and insulators.
We came up with a hypothesis - we thought that metal objects would be conductors and non-metal objects would be insulators.
The children set about testing various items, both metal and non-metal, to see which…

This week we learned that 'expanded noun phrases' and 'prepositional phrases' are not as scary as they sound! 
We learned that we needed a determiner, an adjective and a noun - with the addition of a prepositional or adverbial phrase. 

Children wrote down these different word types on strips…

Our topic in Science this half term is electricity - our DT topic matches this perfectly. We are designing and making a torch! 
This week, children got to try out making different circuits using various components. We really enjoyed making lights shine and watching motors spin. 

After this, we…

Since coming back after the holidays, we have dived straight into lots of wonderful learning. 
Children have started their new history topic, exploring the Romans. We have examined sources and learned about what they tell us. We have discovered the timeline of the Roman Empire and what came…

Middle School enjoyed their Christmas party on Wednesday! We kicked the party off with some fun group quizzes and games. Next, we played the pass the parcel kindly donated by Friends - luckily, we all won something! After that we played party games including musical statues, musical bumps and…