During this half term, Cedars have completed their Through The Ages unit of work where we learnt about life in Iron Age Britain. After learning about hillforts, the children had the opportunity to design their own Celtic homes and villages. We also used our inference skills to read a passage of text about a Celtic warrior before using evidence from this to draw what we thought they would look like. It wasn’t until we had finished these that we were able to look at a warrior and evaluate how closely our pictures resembled them.

We have now moved on to learn about Earth and the different layers that form our home planet. The children have then used this to inspire an imaginary piece of writing. Their task was to create a diary entry about a journey to the centre of the Earth talking about what they could see as they travelled through the different layers. They were challenged to also use as many of the writing techniques they have learnt in SPaG as they could.

In our Art lessons, Cedars have been busy learning about the Beaker Folk that came to Britain at the end of the Stone Age. This unit of work started with the class completing some observational drawings of Bell Beaker pottery. The children had to use shading to try to create a 3-dimensional effect and were not allowed to use any colour to help with this. We have also been using clay to make pots inspired by this group of people. The children had fun foraging for natural materials in the playground to imprint onto their pinch pots.

Since September, Cedars have been enjoying their new topic Through the Ages which has seen them learning about the Stone Age and Bronze Age. We have learnt about the everyday life of people during these ages and thought about how these compare to our modern day lives. The children have had the opportunity to learn about Cheddar Man and looked at what this archaeological discovery tells us about his life. We have used this topic to inspire our written work where we have planned and written our own historical narratives set in the Stone Age. We had to think carefully about how we were going to leave clues for our readers so that they knew the time period our stories were set in.

In our Art lessons, we have been busy learning about the different uses of colour that famous artists may choose to use in their works. The children enjoyed having the chance to look at a range of artworks and discuss the use of colour with their learning groups. Over the past two weeks, we have been busy creating our own final pieces of artwork based on all our knowledge of colour theories.

Our French lessons this half term have been focusing on learning different classroom instructions and how to say parts of our body in French. We even learnt how to sing the song Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes in French! The children have been working hard to use the taught actions to remember the French words and also to accurately record these during their written tasks.  

At the start of this half term, Cedars were given an investigation to complete about the lives of people who lived in the Indus Valley as part of their Ancient Civilisation topic. The children worked in teams to complete a series of activities based on this before joining with another group to share their knowledge and information. It was great to see all of the children displaying good teamwork and gaining so much new information about this period in history.

After this, we moved onto a mini topic looking at the journey our food takes to get to our plates. Cedars were able to use the laptops to initially find out where some of our fruits and vegetables are grown before researching how many food miles this journey is to us in the UK. We then looked in more detail at the processes needed to grow, harvest, prepare and export bananas from Costa Rica. This journey inspired us to bake our own banana bread and write a recipe for this. Some of us loved our banana bread cupcakes whereas others were not so keen!

During this half term, Cedars’ music lessons have been taken up with rehearsing songs ready for our productions of Porridge! The children put on two great performances which received many compliments from the adults that came to watch it. Over the past two weeks in our music lessons, we have been having a musical tour of Africa and learning some songs from this continent. The children were given the extra challenge of singing these in the native languages of the countries they originate from!