What a wonderful start to our Summer Term.  We invited our families to join us in our engage event to launch our topic of 'Carnival'.  The vibe was fun, and we had different activities for our children to indulge in and get a flavour of carnival - we had football skills, Zumba, mask making, percussion and drumming and a coconut shy - it was such fun and it really has accelerated the learning for the children.

 

 

Literacy

This term, we have used the colourful and exciting film Rio to help develop children’s understanding of how films tell stories in fun and creative ways. Through watching key scenes, the children  explored how sound, characters, colour, and language all work together to bring the story to life.  It has brought SO many giggles! 

The bright visuals and catchy music in Rio have been perfect for sparking  imagination. We have done our best listening to how different sounds create mood and excitement, from the hustle and bustle of Rio de Janeiro to the peaceful sounds of the rainforest. We used 'sound on/vision off' to ensure we concentrated - it was a tricky activity, and we really did need to concentrate, and we were able to share our thoughts. We also looked at how the characters express their feelings through their voices, movements, and expressions.

By focusing on the use of colour, we will develop feelings and go on our own colour hunt and discuss the different meanings behind colours - we will make our own characters and also paint our version of the main characters in the story.  As we come to the end of this focus, we will be imagining and bringing to life our own Rio character that could be included in the sequel of Rio3!

We have also focused on 'Persuasive Text' - we started with playing games such as 'would you rather...' or 'would you like a pet lion?' or even 'would you like to come to school on a dragon?'.  We used persuasive vocabulary to try and persuade our friends.  We then looked at our own Nursery prospectus, and we made our own leaflets to try and persuade the Penguin children to come to the Flamingo class.  We used eye-catching illustrations and persuasive reasons - we think everyone would like to be in the Flamingo class! 

Humanities 

We have loved exploring our locality in history - we looked at modern-day history, and we focused on the vibrant Llanmorlais Carnival. We noticed that a long time ago (not 'a long, long time ago!') they used tissue flowers and old trucks - the present day they use bright lights and lots of electronics.  We compared the local carnival with the feast that is in Rio - we did notice some similarities - in both our Llanmorlais carnival and Rio some people walk in the parade and do lots of groovy dance moves! 

 

 

Maths and Numeracy

We have worked hard this half-term on sharing equally, measurements, place value and our business venture.  We have understood that to share equally is to have the same - we have discussed what happens to the remainder with some fruitful answers!  We have loved some of our mental maths games and one fave has been 'higher or lower' - with the winner getting extra dojos!  We are busy working on our market stall - we have decided to make 'Flamingo Popcorn', Name the Flamingo, Flamingo T-shirts, and we even have a 'flash sale' of items that we tried to sell earlier in the year!! We did a price comparison workshop too - Amazon was not quite the cheapest!! Asda and The Range came out tops! We really did have such fun, and we were able to explore money whilst doing our pop-up market.

 

 

Science & Technology

We have loved exploring our locality - we have looked at native birds and used the 'Merlin' bird app to identify the bird song - we even shared this with our families and set it as a task over the weekend - it is astonishing the number of birds we have.  We also compared this with the birds that are found in Brazil - we discussed the climate of each country.  In addition to this, we carried out an investigation of native plants - we found that we have an abundance of marsh grasses and discussed it is because we are by the salty marsh.  We looked at Brazil and found that Rio had bright colourful flowers and again discussed whether it was because of the hot sunny weather and the humidity - whereas, as in Wales, we have variable weather, hence the marsh grasses.  As always we love to walk around our village - we often pop to the marsh to check on the marsh ponies - we like to observe the ebb and flow of the tide too.

 

Expressive Arts

We have been busy exploring the arts - we continued on from our collage and added extra detail to turn it into an entry for Llanmorlais Carnival. We looked at carnival and circus digital media and then interpreted it for our collage - we used bright materials.  We used the book 'Carnival of the Dance' and made a dance full of emotions and movement to interpret the poems - we even made our own poems and interpreted them! As part of our literacy, we have ensured we have had an 'eye-catching' illustration - using posh coloured pencils and taken our time with the movement of the tip.  During our business enterprise we used our artistic skills to design our T-Shirts - we understood that printing on fabric is delicate and time-consuming! Our families also got stuck in, and we have an array of colourful masks in readiness for our class carnival parade - we are so thankful to our families for exploring materials at home too! Miss Atwell has taught us how to compose music, and we even became conductors - we had the power! 

 

Health & Well-Being

The Flamingo class oozes fitness, and we have an ethos of movement that means happiness! This half-term in PE we have focused on our athletic skills - we have become even faster using fast feet and pumping arms as technique.  We loved sports day - we were proud of how hard we trained for the event prior to the day itself.  As a class, we have decided to award 'hydration dojos' - this has meant we are looking after our bodies and minds with all the water we are drinking - we feel fitter too!  We were so delighted to take part in our school fun run - raising funds for outdoor equipment - most of us ran further than 1km - we were exhausted, but we did not give up! We were thankful to our families for all the sponsorship.  Each day we also spend time on our 'Think Equal' story - this has allowed us to understand that we all have equal rights.