We have been helping the children in the Michael Faraday Nursery to improve their sense of rhythm during our musical lessons. We are having great fun reading and exploring some of the ideas in the brilliant Tanker Tanker Skunk. This is a book that has the aim of understanding more abut basic musical rhythm, as well as introducing many different animals. The Nursery children have been think about how many beats can be found in the name of each animal, and then sharing these in small groups.

The animal theme has continued in the Nursery with our role-play area being transformed into a Michael Faraday veterinary practice! We have been explaining to the children the idea of how we need to handle any pets with great care, as well as the importance of vets in helping sick animals to feel better.

With the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee almost upon us, we are also starting to think about a Nursery Jubilee party. We will be explaining to the children more about the role of the Queen, and the work that she does in our country. We are planning to make some Union flags to wave for our party, as well as coming up with some healthy Jubilee style snack ideas.

The Biscuit Bear has been in Reception! We are currently reading this book, and then carrying out many biscuit bear themed activities around the story and the main character. The Reception children decided that it would be a great idea to bake their own Biscuit Bear. We thought about the ingredients that we might need, and then went on a shopping trip so that we could bake our bear.

Having tasted the wonderful Biscuit Bear, we all had plenty of energy to burn off – time to go on a Michael Faraday bear hunt! We were very kindly helped out by Phil, an expert bear catcher. This was a great activity for the children to develop their positional language. We encouraged all pupils to talk about phrases such as going over or under, around or on top.

We are also continuing our European feel in the Michael Faraday Reception. We have now completed our look at Italy. We were very grateful to receive a special visit from some Italian parents, who very kindly answered our questions. Pizza is proving to be a very popular choice of food in the Reception!

We are now about to start learning more about the country of Poland. Anna, a member of staff from Year 1, has offered to speak to the children about her home country. We will be comparing the food and lifestyle of Polish people with what we now know about Italy.

The children in Year 1 have been successfully combining different areas of work based around our monster poems. We have been using our literacy time to write these poems, our ICT sessions to present them on the school laptops, and our D & T time to create some scary monsters out of clay.

We helped the children to think about some of the features and characteristics of their own monsters. We wanted questions to be answered such as what does my monster look like, and what might my monster sound like?

We have encouraged all pupils to use similes in their descriptive work. An example of this might be ‘my monster is as loud as heavy thunder.’ You can listen to a short selection of our Year 1 monster poems being read out in the podcast below.

We have been continuing our work in Year 2 looking at different animal environments. The children have been researching in great detail all about the habitat of the rain forest. We were able to observe this at close hand with a recent trip to London Zoo. Year 2 saw how the hot, steamy conditions are ideal for many of the different animal and insect life that we have been learning about.

We will be able to compare this environment with a very different habitat, when we visit the Dulwich Wildlife Garden later on in the year. This visit will allow the children to experience supervised pond dipping and the plant life that grows around this environment.

Year 3 have made the most of the recent rare and few glimpses of the sun, by carrying out a series of science investigations outdoors. Much of our science work has been about how shadows are formed, and also how they might change over the course of the day.

We asked our pupil to devise an experiment that would help us answer why it appears that shadows can change shape during the day. Using a metre stick, we drew the length of a shadow at a certain time, and then logged this measurement. We then returned to our drawing later on in the school day, to see if the shadow had moved.

You can find out more about our work in the video above, as well as hearing a thorough, scientific explanation as to why shadows might change shape throughout the course of the day.

Year 4 are incredibly proud of our special poetry book that we have produced as a class. The work within is inspired by our reading of the classic Edward Tulane book. This is a very moving story about a china rabbit that experiences many highs and lows throughout his journey. We have been inspired by some of the emotion in the book. We used this in Year 4 as a springboard in which to write our own emotive poetry. This has now been presented in a special poetry book, which we are proud to share with other Michael Faraday classes, or visitors to our school.

Elsewhere in Year 4 and we have been continuing our weekly musical quests with Ruth, our friend from Southwark Wider Opportunities musical services. These sessions have been teaching the children many specialist styles and forms of singing. Pitch, presentation, keeping the rhythm and learning different musical scales have all been key to our shared work.

Year 4 will soon be performing a concert for family and friends at Michael Faraday on 24th May. We will be showcasing all the talents within our class, as well as explaining a little more about the theory that we have been learning. This is an open invite for anyone within our community who has Year 4 connections.

Friendship was the theme for our recent Year 5 assembly. We introduced this idea by saying hello to all of our friends in other classes in a variety of different languages. We then asked the question: what does friendship really mean? We received some great answers back form the other school pupils, and then added to these by offering up some ideas as to what friendship means in Year 5.

We have been writing and developing our own friendship poems during literacy lessons. We wanted the pupils to make their poems as personal as possible, and to describe the emotion that they feel from having close friends around them at Michael Faraday. We shared a selection of these during our assembly, and then finished by asking the other pupils to consider how important their own friendships are.

You can watch a short section of our Year 5 assembly in the video above.

Year 6 are enjoying a much-deserved break away from our recent run of SATS papers. All staff are very proud of the mature manner that our pupils approached SATS Week 2012. It is far too early to make any judgment over the results, but we witnessed on each of the four STAS days all pupils taking great care and dedication to their work.

Four papers were sat in total: reading comprehension, mental maths, maths A and maths B. Science papers will be undertaken later on in the summer term. This will now form the main focus for the remainder of our teaching in the Year 6 curriculum. You can find out how SATS Week went for a couple of our Year 6 pupils in the podcast below.

Away from SATS and much of our attention in Year 6 is now turned towards the prestigious end of year play. We have a few ideas for a possible production that we will be developing over the coming days. The standard each year amazingly still seems to improve. You can catch a reminder over here of how our previous pupils impressed with the end of year production.