Over the past five weeks, Cedars have been enjoying their Topic lessons where they have been learning about earthquakes and tsunamis. We have looked at a number of historic earthquakes and thought about the devastating effects these can have on the areas they strike. Using the impact of the Boxing Day tsunami to inspire a piece of writing we imagined we were journalists reporting from Indonesia. The children were able to include a lot of their key vocabulary to explain the cause of this tsunami, as well as talking about the aftermath it had. 

The children have also  enjoyed their Computing lessons this half term where they have been using an online program to secure their programming knowledge. We have learnt how to draw different polygons and how to debug our algorithm if it does not have the results we expected. Many of the children have been able to challenge themselves to draw letters using the different commands and the abbreviations needed for these.

We have also had the opportunity to take part in weekly violins lessons this term. The children have worked extremely hard and are able to play a variety of short tunes using their newly acquired skills. There was huge excitement when they were able to use the violin bows to play the G, D, A and E strings! We had a mini performance for some of our adults last Friday where we were able to play four songs with our partners

In our Topic lessons over the past six weeks, we have been busy learning about different types of rock and their uses as well as looking at the features of volcanoes. The children have learnt how to use lines of latitude and longitude to locate some of the volcanoes found on planet Earth before using maps to think about the countries and continents they are in. We have enjoyed learning about the historic eruption of Paricutin that happened in Mexico between 1943 – 1952 and used this to inspire the writing of a volcanologist’s report.

Our focus song for this half term in Music has been Three Little Birds by Bob Marley and The Wailers. This has provided the children with the opportunity to listen to another genre of music and think about the features of reggae music. We are now able to play along to parts of this song on the recorder and give feedback to our peers about what they did well when playing as well as how they could make it even better. Last week, we worked in groups to use the chime bars to improvise and even compose a small section to play alongside this song.

This half term, the children have really enjoyed looking at the artwork by LS Lowry and recreating some of his most famous pieces. We have learnt about the use of figures in his paintings as well as looking in detail at the urban landscapes he chose to base his art on. In one of our Art lessons, we were challenged to use some of the techniques used by figurative artists to draw a picture of our hand. The children rose to this challenge and produced some brilliant observational drawings!  

This half term has seen us moving onto a unit of Geography work called Interconnected World. The children enjoyed all of the atlas work within this unit and spotting the different countries the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn run through. We learnt some fascinating facts about the lives of people living in Brazil, Ecuador, USA and Canada. There were even some facts that truly shocked us! After learning of these countries, the children produced some amazing fact files filled with key information about their learning.

In French, we have been learning about introducing ourselves to people and giving some information about our lives. The children first enjoyed learning the new vocabulary before putting actions to these words to aide their recollection. We have often found it difficult to keep a straight face as we became confused with which action matched which word! Over the past two weeks, the children have also enjoyed learning how to say different pets in French before making a poster about this new vocabulary.

Our DT project has seen the children learning how to weave. Although we started this skill with wool, we moved on to use card, which ended up becoming some lovely Christmas inspired weaving. There was some excellent team work in this lesson, with the children helping each other and offering advice to those that found it a little tricky.