Our Adventure begins with a visit to Withernsea!! The sun was shining and the children had a fantastic day. We visited the RNLI lifeboat station to find out about their role at sea, visited Withernsea Lighthouse and found out about the purpose and history of it, we ate lunch on the beach and paddled in the sea and enjoyed ice cream at the ice cream parlour! The children were fantastically behaved, asked amazing questions and represented Westwood amazingly! 

When we returned to school, Mr Cooper shared some exciting news with us from the BBC about new TV show which we are helping with, hence our visit to the seaside! 

We were lucky enough to be visited by a poet today. He worked with us to talk about expression and using our voices. We then wrote some poems about the seaside and creatures. We’ll use the ideas in our writing next week. 

This half term, we are learning about Monet. We began by completing a QR Code scavenger hunt around school to find out facts about his life and work. 

We’re writing a recount of our Withernsea visit this week. We looked at an example and played a matching game with our new Wizard Words. 

In Geography, we began thinking about human and physical features of the coast. We began by reminding ourselves what these were and we will use this knowledge to help us draw sketch maps later next week.

Our final recounts sound fantastic!

Following on from our work about Monet, we began to think about the materials he used in his work. The children split their page into 4 and used oil pastels, water colours, pencil crayons and sketch pencils to try and complete the pictures. They then voted for which one looked most like Monet's style. We decided on watercolours. We then practised our background wash using different brush sizes and strokes. 

We reminded ourselves of Withernsea beach and looked at some more pictures. Every child had a secret mission to label the pictures with. Alongside our painting, we will use these to help with our setting description for this week. 

We're making great progress with Mr Jennings in ukulele! Listen to some of our performances. Well done everyone. 

We completed our variegated background washes on our card starting with the sky and finishing with the sand. We will add our details next week!

It's been a busy week in Oak this week as we have been completing our final Government Multiplication Table Checks after months of practise. Every single child tried their absolute best and showed such resilience and determination to practise their times tables this week! We are so proud of all of them! To celebrate, we enjoyed Ice Pops on the field on Friday afternoon! Well done Oak!

This half term in science, we are thinking about Living things and their habitats. We went up onto the field for a living thing hunt. We discovered ladybirds, grasshoppers, woodlouse, flies and butterflies. We then went back to class and thought about the evidence we had to prove that they were living. 

We worked in groups to complete our sketch maps and they looked brilliant, identifying all of the key features of Withernsea.

Today in science, we started looking at the different groups you can categorise living things into. We narrowed down animals into mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish. We then created branching databases using liquorice before creating them about mini beasts. 

In DT this week, we are building lighthouses. We began by researching the purpose of a lighthouse and the materials we would need. We then designed these as a group and used different materials to create them.

As part of our writing, we imagined our lighthouse was going to be opening to the public. We imagined what would be inside the museum, key features of the lighthouse and what the cafe would serve. We wrote an advert to persuade people to visit. We created chains of synonyms and antonyms with our Wizard Words and included lots of the features we’ve looked at this year. 

Our protect the coast challenge got in full swing this week in geography. We had to build a coastline and a sea defence to protect the coast. The waves then started and we had to see if our sea defence held up! Look at some of the videos below of our attempts!

We had some VERY special guests visit us in LKS2 this week…

Having seen them on video for the past 4 weeks, today they came to visit us in school to talk about why Leeds and Withernsea are the best places. This will help the children make their decision at the final vote in a couple of weeks time!

In PE this half term, we have been learning about the upcoming Commonwealth Games being held in Birmingham. We have been taking part in some personal best challenges based around the sports played at the Commonwealth Games, trying to beat our high score and encouraging our partner.