Term Two Week Seven

Term Two, Week Six

We are getting very busy in the lead-up to Christmas.  We can hear KS1 practising their nativity play in the hall every day and we are really looking forward to seeing for ourselves next Tuesday afternoon.

We finally finished our stage sets this week and what a great job we did with them!  They are all very different, but each one has got lots of little details to make it interesting to look at. There are photos of them all below for you to see. Which is your favourite? We also did a piece of writing around our projects, explaining what we wanted to achieve, how we created our sets, what we liked about them and what we might do differently if we were to do the same project again.

In maths this week, we started work on 3-D shape with Mrs Godden and learnt about nets of shapes with Mrs Short. We all made a cube from a net and decorated them to form our Advent calendar to go on the class Christmas tree. Each box is numbered and each day, one child will open a box designed by another. Inside each box they will find some chocolate coins and a Christmas message from whoever designed their box.

We also finished watching everyone's PowerPoint presentations on William Shakespeare. As explained before, each presentation was marked out of 10. At the end, Mrs Godden collated all the scores on an Excel spreadsheet and our overall winners were Daisy and Tom (who only just beat Elias and Ed - there was only one point between them') Well done Daisy and Tom - there will be a small prize for your both when Mrs Godden returns to class on Thursday. Copies of each presentation can be seen below.

Thursday this week was a very exciting day as the whole school went to see the Mother Goose pantomime at the Marlowe Theatre.  It was a very loud and funny production, with lots of audience participation! (Note to self from Mrs Godden - remember to take ear plugs next year!) We even got wet at one point as there was a water-gun fight between the goodies and baddies at one point.  We all held our breath at one point as three motorbikes roared around inside a not-very-big metal globe on the stage. It was amazing, but a little bit scary!  Look out for Mr File's photos of our trip on the homepage of the website.

We rounded off the week with our Christmas school dinner - a yummy turkey dinner which many of us enjoyed (complete with homemade Christmas hats worn by some classes). We are really in the mood for Christmas now and looking forward to some Christmas arts and crafts over the next couple of weeks.

Term Two, Week Five

We are edging ever closer to Christmas and the trees and decorations went up in school this week in preparation for the Christmas Fair on Friday. Thursday was a tag day with bottles brought in for the adults' tombola - thank you for all your donations.

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Earlier in the week we were given a picture of setting which we had to write a description of and in RE we wrote a letter to Mrs Godden persuading her why Christians should support The Leprosy Mission.  In Maths, we did more work on percentages of numbers, and with Mrs Godden we learnt how to calculate the volume of cubes and cuboids (length x width x height).

We had a very important job to do on Wednesday afternoon. Acting as ambassadors for the school, we took groups of prospective new parents from class to class, showing off our wonderful school. Well done everyone for doing such a professional job!

We also had more time to work on our stage sets this week and they are almost finished - look out for pictures of the finished projects next week.

In Computing over the last few weeks we have been researching Shakespeare and his plays on the internet and then creating PowerPoint presentations about his life and work. On Thursday, many of us got to present their PowerPoints to the rest of the class (those who didn't present this week will do so next week). We had to score each presentation out of 5 for content and another 5 for delivery. Once everyone has presented, the scores will be added up and there may be a small prize for the winner(s)!

Finally, the week ended with the annual Christmas fair which was as busy as ever. Oak class pupils helped out Santa in his grotto and manned our class games - Guess the number of sweets in the jar and Find the lucky square. Winners for both games will be announced and prizes given out at next Friday's assembly. Good luck to everyone who entered!

Term Two, Week Four

We have had the chance to show off our design skills this week by designing and creating our own stage sets for a Shakespeare play. On Wednesday, the classroom became a hive of activity as we began cutting, painting and sticking to build the bases of our sets. We still have some way to go before finishing our masterpieces, but there will be time to finish them off next week.

In other lessons this week, we have been practising calculating percentages and fractions of numbers with Mrs Short and working on area with Mrs Godden, whilst in English we have been studying the famous 'All the world's a stage' speech from Shakespeare's 'As You Like It'. In French, we were given an authentic French recipe and with just dictionaries and a few hints from Mrs Godden we were able to translate these into English.

Finally, in RE, we looked at the role of a Christian charity called The Leprosy Mission whose role is to put Jesus's gospel ('good news') into practice by helping those with and affected by leprosy in man different ways. Much discussion ensued around leprosy, its symptoms and the stigma surrounding it.

Thank you to everyone who bought in a prize for the children's tombola at the Christmas fair taking place next Friday.

Term Two, Week Three

Another busy week has flown by and despite the terrible weather, we did manage to dodge the (almost-constant) rain and get outside from time to time.

As usual, we have been working hard on our learning and some highlights of this week have been:

* Learning how to calculate ratio in Maths with Mrs Short, and the area of compound shapes and triangles with Mrs Godden. There are links to handy BBC Bitesize webpages below if you want to revise and practise some more

* Writing a diary entry as either Romeo or Juliet in English

* Learning about imperative (bossy) verbs in French and then translating a French recipe for biscuits into English

* Designing our own stage-sets for a Shakespeare play in Design and Technology. We will be building these over the next few weeks

* Making and using periscopes to investigate how light travels in Science

* Looking at some of the teachings of Jesus in RE and discussing the values on which Christians build their lives (The parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders)

Don't forget to learn your spellings and spend some time on Prodigy Maths if you can please. Have a good weekend everyone and keep warm and dry!

Term Two, Week Two

Oak Class pupils have enjoyed two very special events this week. Firstly, on Wednesday, we spent the day at Canterbury Cathedral as guests of the Cathedral Schools' Day. After travelling to Canterbury on the no.17 bus (where some of us had to stand as it was only a single-decker), we were the first school to arrive at the cathedral. As we had a bit of spare time, Mrs Godden took us around the outside of the building and pointed out some of the old monastery buildings, including the monks' 'necessarium' (a posh word for their toilets!) We then joined many other children from local Church of England Schools and together we participated in different activities, all of which took place in locations throughout the cathedral. We were put into two groups - one group joined other schools and worked together as a choir, learning a song of praise for the service in the afternoon. The other group was taken on a guided tour of the cathedral dressed as characters from the story of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170. We had a fantastic guide who helped us act out the story, which we really (and sometimes literally) threw ourselves into! We then all went down into the crypt where we took part in five different short prayer activities which we all enjoyed - especially drawing ourselves on the journey of life. After eating our lunch in the Chapter House, we joined all the other children in the nave for a short service of thanksgiving for our cathedral where were sang songs and joined in with some prayers. We had a great time discovering this wonderful building and were lucky enough to get upstairs seats on a double-decker on the way home!

Our second event of the week was taking part in a short remembrance service at the village war memorial. Our Year 6 children are very honoured and privileged each year to take part in this solemn service where we remember all the young men from Elham who gave their lives in World Wars I and II so that we may enjoy the freedom we have today.  As well as reading out poems, we each had several crosses to plant, each with the name of man who died written on it, and each of these was read out loud before their cross joined the others in a long row. We walked to and from the war memorial in total silence and the children's behaviour was excellent - they made great ambassadors for the school.

Photos of both events can be seen below.

Term Two, Week One

Welcome back after our half-term break everyone! We have had a great week as usual. A highlight of this week was our drama session with Mrs Short where we acted out scenes from Romeo and Juliet. Mrs Short and Mrs Vincent were very impressed with our acting skills, which bodes well for our project with the Royal Shakespeare Company over the course of the coming year. For photos of us in action, please see the photo box on the home page of this website.

On Friday we had a very exciting assembly where members of the Elham Historical Society joined us to announce the winners of the writing competition held last term where we wrote our stories about Elham Manor House. Extracts were read out from each of the stories written by pupils in years three t six. In year 6, we had two joint winners - Theo Towers and Elias Slingsby, so big congratulations to both of them for writing wonderfully imaginative stories. In addition to this, Theo's story, 'A Manor of Fear' was chosen as the overall winner of the competition and his story was read out in full (and very scary it was too!). Mr File asked us to give him ideas about other buildings in Elham we could use as inspiration for stories if we were to run the competition again next year. If you have a good idea, please let Mr File know.

Term One, Week Seven

What an amazing book week we have had! Every day has bought us someone new to inspire us in our own writing.

On Monday we were treated to songs and traditional stories from 'The Tales From The Book Of Life' group. Then on Tuesday, Ian from KIC Theatre ran a fantastic drama workshop on Shakepeare's Macbeth with us. We worked both individually and in groups to investigate the feelings and motivations of the key characters as well as creating scenes from the play itself. We also used our bodies to recreate objects from the play such as a crown and a cauldron.  We had a great time at this fun workshop.

On Wednesday, we were visited in class by poet, Tony Peek. We enjoyed listening to a variety of his poems such as 'The Oak Tree', 'Hallowe'en Mask' and 'Words I really like'. He then invited us to share words which we really like ourselves - these included hiccup, onomatopoeia, hydrodynamics and dicomobobulated. We then may up nonsense words which he instantly created definitions for. A 'cabollo' is a dragon from the Eastern Himalayas and 'jobobbly' means to do a job badly!

We were treated to another poet visit when Mr Skinner (Eddie in Beech class's dad) came in to share some of his poems with us. Last year we created poems with him where each line ended with the same sound (for example 'um'). This time we worked on a poem which used rhyming couplets - form of poetry often used by Shakespeare as in:

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." from A Midsummer Night's Dream

Finally we  put forward our own ideas for subjects for poems and voted on which would be our favourite. Sonny's suggestion of a sausage dog won and so we made up a class poem about an accident-prone sausage dog.

Also, on Thursday, we listened to a talk from Lynsey Ilett from Kent Libraries and had the chance to ask her questions. She was really interesting and discussed the benefits of reading with us as well as explaining all the things which could be done at a library as well as borrowing books. Lots of clubs take place at Lyminge library each week and they are even running a special fossil-hunting session on Tuesday 22nd October at 12pm. This is a family event open to everyone, so why not go along and find out all about fossils? Lynsey really encouraged us all to read more and she explained that books allow us to use our imagination. She told us that 'A world without imagination would be nothing. We would have no cars, no phones, not anything.'

Also, as part of book week, we have designed our own book covers for one of Shakespeare's plays (look out for them on display soon) as well as drawing our own interpretation of a Shakespearean character for a school competition. We had a good variety of characters including Macbeth, Juliet, Caliban (from The Tempest), Queen Titania and even Imogen from Cymberline (drawn by Imogen, of course!)

Finally, Friday was much enjoyed as it was dressing up day.  We had a wonderful array of Shakepearean characters across the school. During the morning, we took part in a story-writing workshop with children's novelist Andrew Clover (author of the Rory Branagan (Detective) series). Andrew is always very entertaining and works with us to create the beginning of a story which we then finished in class. The best from each class were chosen and then judged by Andrew, who then handed out prizes to the best in each year-group in celebration assembly.

Seeing everyone together in their wonderful costumes made a wonderful end to another very successful book week. Huge thanks must go to Mrs Ferguson for organising the whole event and creating opportunities for us to use our imaginations to draw and write creatively. 'Thank you' Mrs Ferguson from everyone in Oak Class.

Term One, Week Six

Book Week started early when we had a visit from our first author, James Campbell, on Friday afternoon.  James has written eight books for children including 'The Funny Life of Pets', 'The Funny Life of Teachers' and the Boyface series of novels.  He was absolutely hilarious and had the whole of KS2 in fits of giggles throughout his talk. He explained how he went about writing his books and that the 'Funny' books were designed to be read in any order, with lots of signposts throughout the books sending the reader to completely different pages. Tom, in particular, was very excited to learn that James's next book, due out in 2020, is to be 'The Funny Life of Sharks'. Sharks being Tom's favourite subject, we are sure this book will be on his Christmas/Easter/Birthday list next year!  When asked at what age he decided to become a writer, he replied: 'At the age of seven, when I realised that I couldn't become a duck (which is what I really wanted to be!' After talking a little more about his books in our celebration assembly, James stayed behind to sell signed copies of his books and the very long queue of excited children was testament to how much they had enjoyed his talk and were keen to read more of what he writes.

Earlier in the week, in literacy, we moved on from Shakespeare's Macbeth on to Romeo and Juliet. Mrs Short introduced us to the prologue to the play. We learnt that much of the story is foretold in the fourteen-line sonnet (poem) at the very beginning of the play. We also discussed the meaning behind each line in preparation for writing our own versions of the prologue in modern English next week.

We had fun in our maths lessons this week as we were learning about the properties of circles and had lots of opportunities to draw them - this proved easier for some than others! We learnt that the diameter is twice the radius and that the circumference is roughly three times the diameter. We also learnt about a very special number called pi which is used to calculate the circumference accurately.

We are also loving playing Maths Prodigy during our early-morning sessions. Letters went home this week with our logon details so that we may play at home too. Each week's questions are matched to what we are learning in class, so it is all great for consolodating our learning whilst having fun at the same time.

Next week, we are looking forward to a busy Book Week with lots of author visits and drama sessions, and not forgetting that next Friday is dressing-up day. Don't forget to come along as your favourite Shakespearian character.

Term One, Week Five

Another week has just flown by, culminating in a wonderful Harvest Festival service at the Methodist Church where we performed the French song 'J'aime les fruits' (I like fruits).  A video of us singing will be posted below very soon - please excuse Mrs Godden's singing though! As we couldn't get the song video playing on Youtube, we had to sing acapella.

We have continued our work on Shakespeare this week and will be moving on to Romeo and Juliet next week. In maths with Mrs Godden we have been investigating what angles add up to in triangles and quadrilaterals and then using this information to calculate missing angles. Next week we will be learning all about circles.

On Thursday morning we read a short comprehension text as a class, then answer questions about it individually. This week was very interesting as we learnt about Georges de Mestral, the Swiss inventor of Velcro. Did you know that Velcro is a biomimetic material - this means that it copies an idea from nature. In Georges's case, he noticed how burrs stuck to his dog's fur and then developed a nylon strips with hooks on to mimic how this happens. His invention is now used for many different purposes worldwide, including holding a heart together during cardiac surgery.

Finally, on Friday morning, we were visited by Ms Shepherd during our RE lesson. She was investigating what it is like to be a learner in our school. She was amazed by our discussions about creation, the Big Bang and evolution and when she spoke to some of use individually she was impressed with our enthusiasm for learning at Elham School.

Keep up the good work Year 6!

Term One, Week Four

Shakespeare's Macbeth has been the focus of our literacy this week in Oak Class.  We have investigated who was responsible for the murder of King Duncan - the Weird Sisters, Macbeth or Lady Macbeth.  We each had our own opinions of which we had to persuade the rest of the class. There is perhaps no one person who is wholly responsible - Macbeth, without the idea being planted in his mind by the Weird Sisters and then being encouraged by his ambitious wife, may well not have had the courage to murder the king. But then Shakespeare would never have written one of his best plays! We have also been retelling the story of Duncan's murder as a newspaper report, complete with snappy headlines.

Music with Mrs Hickman started last week and we were very excited to learn that we will be performing samba music from Rio Carnival, complete with a variety of drums and percussion instruments. We have already begun to practise the different rhythms prior to Mrs Hickman deciding who will play which instrument.  She was very pleased with how well, as a class, we were able to keep the different rhythms going. We are very excited at the prospect of performing our South American samba later in the year.

Having learnt the names of many foods and drinks in French, we are now learning to express our food preferences using J'aime, Je n'aime pas, J'adore and Je détèste. Look our for us performing a song about our favourite fruits at next week's Harvest Festival in the Methodist church.

Finally, we truly had our minds expanded in RE this week when we watched videos explaining how the universe was created and how life evolved on Earth. There then followed a discussion as to who created Creation, with the inevitable question of 'Who created God?' We discussed the fact that different people's interpretations of creation depend on their faith, or lack of faith.

It has been another fact-packed week of learning where we had many opportunities to express our own opinions.

Term One, Week Three

Work has begun in earnest in Oak class this week. The children have been especially enthused with the story of Macbeth and have been examining who was responsible for the murder of Kind Duncan - the Weird Sisters, Lady Macbeth, or Macbeth himself. They will need to make up their own minds and create a piece of persuasive writing, justifying their choice.

On Thursday afternoon, we enjoyed a fascinating and enjoyable visit to Elham Manor House which is located at the top of the hill from the village shop. This historic house was built in 1387, but there has been a manor house in Elham since the 11th century when Edric of Elham was lord of the manor. The visit was arranged by the Elham Historical Society who have invited all the Key Stage 2 pupils to create a piece of creative writing based on an idea triggered by the house or its history.  These will then be judged by the EHS.  Oak class came up with many different ideas and have begun work on their pieces, which will be completed early next week.

On Friday afternoon we began this term's RE topic of Creation by listening to the story of creation from Genesis and drawing and writing about each day, before answering some more thought-provoking questions such as 'How does the story make you feel?' and 'What kind of text is Genesis 1 and what is its purpose?'  As we worked we listened to two pieces of music which represent the creation and God the Almighty himself. Click the links below for more details.

Enjoy the sun and warmth on Saturday, but don't forget your raincoats on Sunday though.

Term One, Week Two

Having settled in so well last week, Oak Class had a very good week, punctuated only by the dreaded Kent Test on Thursday!  It was evident that every child did their very best and stayed calm throughout the numerous individual tests.  We hope that those who took the Shepway Test on Saturday found it a little easier and wish everyone luck as they wait for their results in October.

Term One, Week One

Firstly we would like to offer a big 'welcome' to all the pupils who have joined Oak class this September.  They have all had a great start to their time as year 6s and we look forward to working with them all and seeing them make super progress throughout their final year at Elham Primary School.

It has already been a busy week for the class. We asked them to complete this year's SATs papers in English, Maths and GPS so that we could benchmark where each child is and to help us inform our planning for the year.

Reading Records were handed out and following a Star Reader test,  the children were given their book levels for this term. Reading Records should be updated at least weekly and handed in on Mondays for Mrs Short to read. We expect every child to read every day and to try and complete at least one book quiz per week.

Spelling were also given on Friday and will also be tested on a Friday morning before our weekly GPS lesson. There are three groups and each child knows which group they are starting in, although they are able to move up or down a group depending on their results each week.

Finally, times tables are tested every Thursday morning. We do expect all the children to know their tables by heart up to 12x by the beginning of year 6, but if your child is still struggling with any of these, there are plenty of online resources to help them secure their knowledge. They can log on to Purple Mash at home and check their knowledge by completing a short test, then use their online game to practise any tables they are not secure with. If your child has forgotten their Purple Mash login, please have them ask Mrs Godden for a new login card.

We are looking forward to a busy but exciting year of learning in Oak Class.

Mrs Short, Mrs Godden and Mrs Vincent