Holly Hill Primary and Nursery School
Spring 1
Happy New Year 2023
We're looking forward to another fabulous half term in Owl Class and this is what we've got to look forward to. In History Year 5s and 6 are required to study an ancient civilisation and we do this in our topic 'The Golden Age'. Our main text for English will be 1001 Arabian Nights along with other reading materials. In History we learn about the ancient city of Bagdad. In Art we focus on Islamic Art and on investigating, re-creating and designing our own geometric patterns. The Circulatory system of the Heart, Arteries, Veins and Blood is our focus in science. After learning about the function of these we will be carrying out investigations to study the affect of exercise on our heart. In Maths we are starting off with Fractions. Please see our Knowledge organiser for more details and for our vocabulary lists.
New spellings are in Reading Diaries for the whole half term.
PE days are Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Friday 10th February
Our Great Project Graduation
and our final promises.
Wednesday 8th February.
Researching this ancient civilisation in History. Why Baghdad was ahead of its game in so many areas. We are producing information posters to show our findings.
Tuesday 7th February. Talking about the difficulties that people face on-line and what help is available. Safer Internet Day 2023.
Friday 3rd February. Our Great Project session today got the children thinking about different forms of abuse and some of the excuses that people give for being abusive.
Thursday 2nd February
Science
Taking our pulse rate at rest and then again after exercise - we investigated our heart pulse rate and how it is effected by exercise.
We recorded our findings in a table and then transferred this information onto a graph. We will now use the graph to look for patterns and draw our conclusions.
Wednesday 1st February. Some of our English work this week.
Some absolutely fabulous gymnastics work today. I am so impressed with how the children have developed in this subject this half term. As well as improving balance skills the children have become fab performers.
Wednesday 25th January. PE with Miss Bateman. Developing balance on the apparatus.
Tuesday 24th January
Today we started the text The Golden Horsemen of Baghdad. Prior to reading we looked at some of the challenging vocabulary in the chapter and used dictionaries to find definitions. We’re getting really good at using dictionaries!
Friday 20th January. Maths Morning today as we did a Maths Tough 10, practised our times table recall on TT Rock, completed our unit on Fractions and then played the end of unit game.
Happy and Sad in Owl class today!
…….. as we say goodbye to Miss Mills for a short time as she goes on her maternity leave. We will miss you but we can’t wait to hear your baby news soon ☺️ Today was celebrated with flowers and cake!
( Owl class demolished the cake before I could take a picture 😁 )
Thursday 19th January
Our 2nd Art lesson was exploring Tessellations. We copied some and then had a go at creating our own. Tessellations can be found in Islamic patterns.
Tuesday 17th January. Group research extending learning about the Circulatory system and the function of blood.
Friday 13th January.
The Year 5 GREAT PROJECT.
Today we have started the Great Project at our school with all Year 5s. For the next 3 weeks we’ll be exploring and talking about what makes a healthy relationship and how do we know when a relationship is not healthy. Owl class had a great first session. They loved Jonathan and Olwin who will be joining us every week to lead the sessions. At the end of the session the children had 20 minutes to be creative- writing songs and raps about what they’d discussed today and I have to tell you they were amazing. We’re looking forward to next week already.
Thursday 12th January. We have created a timeline in our first History lesson today plotting all of the time periods that we know. We have then shown the Islamic Age as this is the period for our History lessons this term.
Wednesday 11th January
A great start to gymnastics this morning with Miss Bateman.
Tuesday 10th January
Our Islamic Experience day led by the Reverend Ken Johnson.
Friday 6th January
Art- We are starting to learn about Islamic Art and today looked at examples of it. We now know it does not have any religious pictures or symbols in it like some examples of Christian artwork. It is made up of symmetrical repeating patterns of regular shapes and geometrical patterns. Here we are investigating it and hunting for shapes within the designs. We loved it!
Thursday 5th January
We had a fab day today with everyone ready and happy to be back (I think😁) We started our English work. Ask the children to tell you all about Caravan Camels. In the afternoon we finished off some Science work from last half term. Photos of our classification trees are in last terms pages. We used our own criteria and ‘yes’ ‘no’ questions to group and sort animals.