Highmoor 23rd May

Date: 23rd May 2025 @ 9:26am

Welcome to this half term in Highmoor!

We have been busy with trips out including a cricket session at Kidmore End cricket club where local schools mixed together and practised skills and ended the morning with a few games, we all enjoyed this fun morning. We also attended Quad Kids at Chiltern Edge where we took part in sprint, long distance, standing jump and howler throwing events. We ended the day there with a relay race and lots of celebrating our achievements! Earlier this week we went to Reading Museum and took part in a Romans workshop. We found Roman equivalents of modern day objects, investigated the local town of Cavella its buildings and layout, and learnt about the differences between the Roman way of life and the Celts. We dressed up as different Romans including slaves, the rich, a doctor, a blacksmith and a hairdresser and then found objects that they would have used in everyday life. We also learnt about how good the Romans were at building and the difference in strengthening a structure an arch would make! We tested out bridges built with and without arches and then had a go at making our own arch. We finished by exploring the museum including a visit to the replica of the Bayeux tapestry. A lovely day out!

In the classroom we have been learning about measurement in maths. We started by looking at mass - comparing grams and kilograms, and reading the scale on scales, this was tricky particularly when we had to work out what the scale was. We moved to capacity and volume and practised the same skills. We are now learning about time. We spent a while learning how to tell the time on an analogue clock to 5 mins , some of us moved on to 1 min. We then looked at digital clocks. Those of us more confident have been using Roman numerals and doing lots of problem solving and reasoning questions.

In literacy we started the half term learning about fables and focused on the African tales about Anansi, the spider trickster. We wrote our own versions of these and enjoyed retelling them to each other. We then moved on to learning about myths and had lots of fun hearing about Roman Gods, acting out stories and hot seating characters. We finished by writing our own myth.

We used the characters from our Anansi stories in art to design articulated animals which we have used for shadow puppets and stop motion animation. We had a virtual visit from Dara McGarry of DNEG Animation who told us about being an animator and working on big films like Frozen!

We have been studying the Romans in history and started by learning a little about how Rome was founded and what life was like. We then moved on to the invasions of Britain and what happened once the Romans conquered us.

In Science we have been looking at light and shadow and tied it in with our art topic of animated animals and our literacy topic of Anansi stories!  
We discovered why and when shadows can be different sizes, how some look more solid than others and how light can reflect off surfaces and make different colours!

Throughout the half term the children have, as always, been a pleasure to teach and have tried their best in all they've done. We hope you all have a good break and are looking forward to next half term.