Cedar

Summer Term 1: Curriculum Plan.

I hope that you will all have a wonderful and restful Easter holiday after a busy and hard-working Spring Term. When you return we will have a lot of interest topics to cover including:

English:- Alte Zachen

The tale of a Jewish Grandmother who always seems to be complaining as she wanders around New York. Was she always that miserable?

We will be using props to retell a story, write a character description, a flashback, a diary entry in role and a short autobiography.

Science:- Changes of materials.

We will be carrying out investigations into the properties of materials and what we can do to change them.

History:- Victorians

We will be getting to know British history on a local and world scale and discovering how a range of sources inform us about the past.

PSHE:- Relationships

Computing: Physical Computers

P.E:- Striking and fielding

Outdoor learning

We will also be having two amazing trips: one to the natural history museum to take part in an Earthquake and Volcano workshop! The second is to the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank to see a live orchestra and sing along to some of their music.

Spring 2 Highlights:

This term we have had a lot of fantastic learning and experiences in Cedar Class including:

-Learning the Ukelale and other instruments in music

-A fantastic Easter celebration

-Science week (including a space dome!)

-Road safety workshop

-Learning when and how to use the recovery position.

Spring Term 2: Curriculum Plan.

I hope that you all have a wonderful and restful half-term and I'm sure you will come back full of energy and excited to learn. We have a lot of interest topics to cover including:

English:- The lost thing.

We will be using an intreguing yet bizarre story of a mysterious being that appears in an unexpected place to write diary entries, formal letters, adverts, character descriptions and non-chronological reports. The unit will have strong links with our Science lessons.

Science:- Properties of materials.

The annual Spring Music Festival launches in just over 2 months and Cedar class have been selected to form the ‘materials committee’. Do we know our thermal insulators from our thermal conductors? Can we find the best materials for take-out bags and drinks bottles? We will need to carry out an impressive array of tests to identify which materials are up to the job for a variety of festival needs.

RE:- Sikhism.

We will be asking ourselves the question: Are Sikh stories important today? To help us answer the question we will discover several Sikh stories and investigate what they have to say about beliefs and how people should treat each other.

PSHE:- Healthy Me

We will be exploring how healthy food helps our bodies grow but alcohol and smoking have negative effects on our bodies. We will discover what body image is and learn some simple first aid.

P.E:- Dance

Outdoor learning

As I am sure you will agree from looking at the amazing pictures above, Cedar class have had a great half term full of fun, laughter and learning. We have had plenty of oportunities to perform in front of audiences in a variety of ways, including: creating our own videos in computing, role playing important black females from the historic space race and discussing our future dreams and goals and how to achieve them.

My personal highlight was Pokemon day: the entire class finished assessment week with a day to spare and we spent the whole day doing activities such as making costumes out of recycling, speaking Pokemon language and creating a Pokemon land in the classroom for us to role play in!

Other learning highlights have included: making models of the Earth, including its layers, making pop-art-animals and discovering how forces work.

Spring Term 1: Curriculum Plan.

When we return from Christmas, we have an exciting 5 week plan for our learning. We look forward to welcoming three new children into the class, too!

English:- Hidden Figures

We will be learning about the lives of 3 influencial black women who forever changed the world with their contributions to the American race to the moon, focusing on non-fiction writing and entertaining newspaper articles.

Science:- May the Force Be With You

We will be looking at everyday, real life forces and how unbalanced forces create movement.

Geography:- Earthquakes and Volcanoes

We will be looking at the effect that tectonic plates have on our lives and how we can minimise the effects of earthquakes and volcanoes.

PSHE:- Dreams and Goals

We will be exploring our aspirations for the future, including careers. We will be comparing our common dreams with those of people in other cultures.

Computing:- Video production

P.E:- Net and Wall Games

Outdoor learning

Christmas 2023

What an amazing half term we have had full of happy memories and learning! We have immersed ourselves in World War 2 through our literacy tree work and were thoroughly involved in the whole school WW2 day which included gas mask making, timeline making and rationing. This fitted in perfectly with the poetry we had been reading in English. We really tried to read and write expressing emotions.

In maths we have focused on practical, real life subjects like telling the time and measuring angles, alongside our usual numeracy skills. Science was really interesting as we looked at how humans fit into the animal kingdom and how we change as we get older. The children enjoyed learning about the Hindu religion and we learnt about people's differences and diversity.

Most excitingly, we ALL learnt how to play Eye of Tiger by Survivor on the ukelele with our new instrument teacher, Simon. Finally, we have had a wonderful Christmas celebration including the Christmas Carol concert with our parents and carers and Miss Stone's true Christmas story assembly. 

Autumn 2:

Welcome back. We hope that everyone had a relaxing and refreshing half term ready for the new term that will take us all the way to Christmas. Its an 8 week half term, but as always we have plenty of exciting things to look forward including two upcoming trips (to Dinosaur Crazy Golf and Frameless Art) in addition to some exciting Christmas activities.

In terms of our topics, this half term we will be learning:

English:- WW2 poems

We will be focusing on language choice, information retrieval and looking at how to stir up emotions with our writing of poetry.

Science:- Animals including humans

Looking at the similarities and differences between us and animals including gestation, growth, development and using graphs to learn and present data.

Music: Livin' on a prayer

We will be using the Charanga program to take a practical approach to learning song "Livin' on a prayer".

R.E.: Hinduism

We will be investigating the question "What is the best way for a Hindu to show commitment to God?

PSHE:- Celebrating differences

Computing:- Vector graphics

P.E:- Gymnastics

Outdoor learning

End of Autumn Term 1:

What a fantastic 7 weeks we have had. There are too many highlights to list them all but I hope to give you a flavour in this update and pictures:

• We found a huge brain in the hall and it was full of objects. We used this for our English work.
• We learnt a huge amount about dinosaurs and created a large £d timeline of the main time periods, complete with a functional volcano.
• We learnt about animal classifications and their varied life cycles. We even looked at unusual animals like kangaroos and platypus.
• We created our own art gallery with 5 pieces of work that all used acrylic paint applied with different techniques (almost no paintbrushes were used at all!).
• We went on a school trip to Danson Park.

Welcome to Cedar Class

2023 - 2024

I hope that all the children had a lovely Summer holiday and are ready for another school year! Mr Macey and Miss Bingham are excited to welcome back the four Year 5 children we had in Birch class last year and hope that new classmates will join us in the not too distant future.

We have been working hard in the summer to ensure that an exciting and engaging curriculum is ready and details of this half term's learning can be found on this page. I will be updating this page from time to time to show off some of the more exciting activities we get up to and to show off some of our best pieces of work, too.

We are kicking off the year the way we mean to carry on with a trip on the first week. We aim to have at least one each half-term. We are looking forward to meeting as many of you as we can for an informal meet and greet at our Parent Afternoon on the 21/9/23.

Our first full week (starting 11/9/23) will be assessment week so that we can get to know how our children are doing and after a successful trial last year, we will continue our "5 a Day" whole school movement sessions as well as offering our sensory circuits for children who need a reset throughout the day. We will now be having our achievement assemblies on Fridays just before home-time and I can't wait for the children to show off all their accomplishments!

Please feel free to reach out and contact any of the members of Cedar class via the office on 0208 3177659 or email neilmacey@imperium.greenwich.sch.uk (we love to chat and catch up!).

Mr Macey and Miss Bingham

Curriculum: Autumn 1 2023

English: Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers 

Focusing on themes of family, love, conservation, health and belonging, this non-fiction text is a guide to life on Earth. Children will experiment with the idea of filling their heads with thoughts, ideas and dreams. Children go on to explore the Earth’s beauty and use literary
language to write some non-narrative poetry.

Maths: Maths No Problem

The children will be working in small groups or independently and building on the numeracy skills we covered last year to focus on a wide range of topics such as shape, graphs, weight and capacity.

Science: Living things and their habitats.

In Science this term, we will be learning about how plants reproduce, insect and amphibian lifecycles, animals and birds and people around the world.

Art: Exploring Art Unit 1

We will be creating abstract paintings, getting used to using runny paints and posting pictures of our art work online.

Computing: Computing Systems & Networks

We will explore how data is transferred over the internet including communication and collaboration tools.  We will complete shared projects online and compare different methods of communication. Finally, they will focus on e-safety including what should and should not be shared on the internet.

History: Dinosaurs and fossils.

We will be looking at the different parts of a dinosaur's body and how that affects fossil formation, classify dinosaurs, look at the different periods of dinosaur history and discover where fossils can be found in the UK.

Zones of Regulation, PHSE, PE & Outdoor Learning

All of our class have completed the Zones of Regulation program so we will be revisiting key parts and looking at case-studies to ensure we understand and acknowledge our feelings and emotions. Each morning we will check-in with our zone and monitor it throughout the day.

Our PHSE topic this half term is 'Being me in my World'. The children will look ahead to the year ahead, understand what it means to be a citizen and explore their rights and responsibilities.

Miss Sutton will be taking the children for P.E every Tuesday and PE kits are provided..

This year the children will also be taking part in ‘Outdoor learning’. We are excited to show the children more of the wonderful outdoors and getting them to work closely with nature.