Lamborghini Class – Autumn Term 1, 2022

Welcome to the home page for the first half of the Autumn term 2022. There is something special about the start of a new school year; new classrooms; new topics and new friendships. This page will give you a flavour of our learning this half term.

Our current topic is called Frozen Kingdoms. It is a geography-based topic all about the Arctic and Antarctic regions. As much possible, we try to make cross-curricular links across all subjects. The topic web below will give you an outline of what we will be covering in each subject area.

New updates are added to this page weekly. We hope you enjoy reading about our learning.

Week ending – Friday 21st October

The highlight of our week this week was having a Zoom meeting with a real-life polar explorer!

On Tuesday, we were incredibly lucky to have a Zoom meeting with Wendy Searle who runs expeditions to Antarctica and also takes part in polar challenges. She told us all about the steps you need to take in order to go on an expedition to the polar regions. This included things such as hard training, getting sponsorship, sourcing the correct equipment and getting all of your food prepared in advance.

It was so inspirational to listen to Wendy because she told us that only a few years ago, she had never been further than France but took part in a challenge with the charity she was working with which led her to learn more about Antarctica, train and plan her own expedition. She made us realise that anyone can take on such a challenge!

In 2019/2020, Wendy explained that took part in a polar challenge to ski solo, and unaided, to the geographic South Pole. She had to ski, pulling a sled called a ‘pulk’. The pulk needed to carry all of the food and equipment that Wendy needed for the challenge. Wendy completed the challenge in under 45 days! We were very excited to hear about the new challenge Wendy will be completing in the coming months: to be the fastest woman to solo ski to the South Pole! We will eagerly track her progress when she starts.

In other lessons, we finished off our short stories in English which had a link between humans, animals and the environment. The children really challenged themselves to write in a different style to their normal writing.

With Mrs Wortley on Friday, the children created some stunning artwork of the Northern Lights to accompany the haiku poems they had written. You can see them below.

We’ve had a great start to the new school year. It’s been wonderful to see the children embrace their learning and rise to our school aim which is ‘Be the best you can be!’

Have a safe and relaxing half-term.

Week ending – Friday 14th October

Monday mornings are really enjoyable in Lamborghini Class as Miss Andrews gets a chance to look over the reading records for the previous week to catch up on what the children have been reading at home. It’s very exciting because week on week, Miss Andrews has seen that more and more children are reading more frequently at home and reading lots! This week a couple of children have started reading Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver; not only have they enjoyed reading this new book, but they have actually read half of it already! This makes me so happy as great readers leads to great writers!

Moving onto writing, it has been a fantastic week for further developing our writing skills. In recognition of National Poetry Week on 6th October, we had a go at trying something new – black-out poetry! Black-out poetry uses extracts from other texts and creates a new poem using carefully selected words from the text. An illustration is also added to the page. To link with our Frozen Kingdoms topic, we each chose a page from a fiction or non-fiction text with a polar theme to create a blackout poem.

The children thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to be creative and make their own blackout poems. Lots of the children chose extracts from Shakleton’s diary of his South Pole adventures and captured the conditions in the harsh polar environment Shakleton and his team faced. The photos below show the finished learning.

In maths this week we have finished off our unit on place value. It’s been great to see the progress the children have made particularly in some of the harder areas including rounding, using Roman Numerals and problem solving.

Science this week, also gave us an opportunity to practise our writing skills as we wrote a recount of our trip to the Science Museum. The children also selected photos and information from maps and leaflets to enhance their writing. It was so pleasing to read about how much the children enjoyed the visit. There are some photos of the children’s writing below.

For our home learning this week, the children had to research the factors that lead to climate change and the impact that this has on the Arctic and Antarctic. The children discovered lots of the reasons for climate change and then drafted some questions for a university researcher who is going to help us with our studies in this area because she is studying the impact of climate change in the Antarctic. We selected our best questions and then emailed them off to her. We look forward to finding out the answers.

At the end of the week, amongst their other learning, the children finished off their soap sculptures of Inuit inspired art with Mrs Wortley. They are fantastic!

Such an exciting and busy week – Thank you so much Lamborghini Class for bringing so much enthusiasm to the class.

Week ending – Friday 7th October

The highlight of our week was most definitely going to the Città della Scienza (Science City) in Naples.

We had to set off from school really early to be at the Science City in time for our first tour. Everyone arrived promptly and were excited to be going out for the day. We were lucky as the rainy weather we have had for the last week passed and we were treated with a beautiful sunny day.

We arrived in time for our first guided tour and was greeted by our English-speaking tour guide. She took us to the Human Body exhibit which was jam packed with 100 interactive exhibitions which helped us to learn about the human body. We learnt lots of amazing facts about the body and got to learn about it by taking part in the interactive activities.

One of the first activities was about the brain; we found out by looking at various skulls that the size of the brain doesn’t necessarily equal intelligence. We then had a go at testing our brain power against a chimpanzee! We had to look at number tiles on a screen and remember the order of them. Then, when the numbers were taken away, we had to remember the order; it was a difficult challenge. We discovered that the reason why the chimp could do this so well is because their brains are used to assessing the dangers in their environments so are constantly scanning and memorising information.

Other exciting exhibits in the human body section were using a machine to burn the calories you gain from a peanut; lying on a bed of nails and talking to a robot! All of the knowledge we gained will be very helpful when we learn about the human body later in the year.

We then made our way to the planetarium. We then had a tour of the solar system which was amazing as the screen was so large …it made us feel like we were actually in space. It was perfect to help us build on the knowledge we gained in class when we researched facts about the planets.

After lunch, we were able to look at the insects exhibit where we saw lots of ants, stick insects and even a tarantula!

It was a wonderful trip and we were incredibly proud of the children’s impeccable behaviour.

Week ending – Friday 30th September

Welcome to the new school year from Lamborghini Class.

This is our first website update since the beginning of the school year. So much new learning has happened over the last four weeks.

Firstly, and most importantly, we have established ourselves as a new class. We have welcomed some new children; have become familiar with our learning environment and got used to the weekly routine. We have a wonderful atmosphere for learning in the class with everyone trying their very best in all that they do.

Our topic this half term is called Frozen Kingdoms. It is a geography based topic all about the polar environments of the Arctic and Antarctica. We have already learnt about the geography of the areas in terms of climate and landscape so we have a much better idea of why they are such inhospitable areas for people to live. We had a special focus week in the first week of term where we trained like polar explorers by dragging tyres, tried dried food and investigated icebergs!

Our English lessons link directly with our topic as we are studying a stunning book called Ice Bear by Jackie Morris. The text is illustrated beautifully and the story shows the strong links which exist between humans, animals and their environments. We have learnt sections of the text and are now in the process of practising writing in the style of Jackie Morris.

The focus for maths during these first few weeks has been place value. We have looked at the value of each digit in numbers to 1,000,000 (Year 5) and 10,000,000 (Year 6). We have used lots of reasoning and problem solving to be able to compare numbers. This week we have begun to use our rounding skills.

Science and music are linked this half term as we are studying Earth and space; a theme in both subjects. There are also strong links with our Frozen Kingdoms topic as we have looked at the impact of Polar Day and Night due to the tilt, rotation and orbit of the Earth. The children are very much enjoying finding out about space and regularly impress us with the new facts that they have discovered. In music we are singing a song about the sun, listening to music pieces inspired by space and reading music to create our own class compositions.

Art is also linked to our topic. With Mrs Wortley on Fridays, the children are studying the style of Inuit art and creating their own pieces.

A busy few weeks but very enjoyable!

The photos below show you some of the activities we completed during our polar enrichment week at the beginning of term.