November project presentations

Early years

We have had a lovely week welcoming Pol! We are all getting to know him and are very happy to have him in our class. We had a great morning out at the library. We also played in the playground and looked at the big Christmas tree and decorations around the town. We had an impromptu excursion when we realized that the Christmas flags were being erected around the town! We went out in search of our flag and, using Giulia's telescope and a map that she drew, we managed to find it! As November draws to a close, we are moving on from the festival and onto Christmas! We have started talking about it and deciding on different decorations for our classroom. Watch this space!

Primary

This week in English and Topic we have been working on our presentations for Friday. We have worked independently in groups to devise our presentations, thinking about what information to include and how to learn the information we want to share. As part of this process we were assigned roles within our groups such as ‘manager’, ‘spokesperson’ and ‘imagination officer’. We have made props to demonstrate our learning and interests. We have been working on the ‘ai’ phoneme this week, learning to write and recognise words such as train, mail, snail, maid, wait, etc. We’ve also been continuing with our carol singing!

In Mathematics, students have been demonstrating their knowledge of partitioning numbers, place value and number operations. Students have been undertaking minor progress assessments in order to develop benchmarks for further studies. We’ve also been able to introduce some additional maths games into our weekly routines to encourage further learning and self-testing of skills learnt throughout the term.

Secondary

In English we have been continuing with our reading of Bradley Chalker’s story, trying to work out why he behaves like he does. We have written a diary about his first day in the story and tried to show what his emotions would have been. We have also looked at punctuating direct speech, which we will need in order to write our newspaper articles.

This week in History class we discussed what history is and what historians do. We played at historians and learned how to use the sources to study the past. We interrogated some sources (paintings, maps, texts) to get information about how people in Great Britain lived before 1066. From so little evidence we can tell so much! We also reviewed from the previous lesson which people lived in Great Britain before the 1066; from prehistoric communities until the Vikings. And we discussed what these people brought to Britain that is still important for British culture and identity. Do you know Romans brought the first cats that ever existed in the UK? Moreover, for a better understanding of cultural heritage, we discussed about who lived in Catalonia in the past, since the Iberians to the Arabs, and identified what we got from them.

This week in Geography class we reviewed the history of Earth. We started from the beginning of the Universe. This lead some of us to question the meaning of nothing. How can we imagine nothing? How can something appear from nothing? We have no clear answers. However, we moved on to the following stages of the story, passing through the formation of Earth, the moon, the atmosphere, the oceans…until the appearance of the first living cells! This would be origin of life on earth that would one day lead to us!

Since we are having an assessment about this theme next week, we played a game to make history of Earth and the development of life easier to remember. We divided the class in two groups, each group had different pictures that represented different phases on Earth’s history, so we had to stick them in the correct order. Finally, both groups could compare if they had built the same story or if they missed some part of it!