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! 

Our half term started with a visit from an Egyptian who had travelled through time to teach us about his life in Ancient Egypt. The children had great fun learning how to use reed pens and ink to write their own message in hieroglyphics. In our Topic lessons, we have been busy learning about Ancient Sumer and what it would have been like to be alive at this point in history. We have recently moved on to learn about Ancient Egypt which has given us the opportunity to compare these two civilisations. At the end of this week, the children are going to be writing debates about whether life in Ancient Egypt was better than our lives in the modern day UK.

Over the past six weeks in Art, Cedars have been learning about Islamic art and using this knowledge to create their own pieces of work. We have learnt about the different features of this style of artwork with a particular focus on the star motifs and the symmetry used. In one of our lessons, the children used compasses to create their own five and seven circle motifs. Everyone showed great resilience and teamwork to help each other out with using the compasses correctly.

In our French lessons, Cedars have been learning how to talk about the different shops and places found in their town. The children are able to ask where someone lives as well as answer this question. They have been producing some lovely, colourful posters of all of the new vocabulary they have learnt in this unit of work. 

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