"They will soar on wings like eagles" (Isaiah 40:31)
Respect / Responsibility / Courage / Trust / Perseverance / Compassion
Grebes performed their song live in assembly. All children have learned the song and many have had a hand in writing it – the chords, the words, the melodies and the solos. Later in the morning Mr Bell set up a studio in our classroom and we began recording each part of the song separately. Updates coming soon!Â
This half-term children are getting green-fingered, growing plants from seed to investigate the effects of changing factors like amount of water, sunlight, space or type of soil. Many children’s hypotheses have proven correct, but no one predicted that Mirren’s radish plant in our stationery cupboard, with no sunlight at all, would grow better than her other plant on the windowsill! Time for a secondary investigation…
On June 14th Grebes teamed up with Gatekeepers class from Neatishead to visit Strangers Hall in Norwich to learn all about the ‘Strangers’, people from the Low Countries who were invited here as refugees in 1565. They were Protestants and persecuted for their faith by Catholic authorities. In RE, Grebes have been exploring the Big Question: Is religion a force for peace, conflict or both? We got to meet Jakob, a Stranger in full 16th century garb, who told us of the danger he faced as a Protestant. We learned about how he rebuilt his life in Norwich and, along with the other Strangers, galvanised trade (and fashion!) in our fine city!
In Grebes, Children read the poem ‘You See?’ by Matt Goodfellow, all about how kind words stick to us ‘like pollen to the knee of a bee’. Children drew legs on their bees and buzzed around the classroom searching for kind words that might stick to them!
Since the Strangers’ Hall trip, Grebes have developed an obsession for weaving! It was only fitting, when they heard that Mrs Gay – school governor and friend to our school for well over a decade – was weaving us, to get out the looms once more. Here is the card the children made.
Grebes have loved investigating melting points this week, heating various substances and recording the temperature at which each began to melt. Cheese, butter, dark/white/milk chocolate, gummy bears – we melted it all. Children were able to reflect on the results of the investigation and why the first attempt was not a scientifically rigorous fair test – for example, some groups had the heat source further away from the substances being melted, and some had the thermometer in different positions. They have worked together to plan a repeat experiment with variables under strict control.
We took two musical groups to play at this year’s Norfolk County Music Festival: a Year 4/5/6 ukulele orchestra (with a few guitars and a keyboard) and our Salsa Band (veterans of two previous County Music Festivals). As you can see from the videos, the children were incredible. Salsa Band kicked off the show with a Latin medley, before our ukulele orchestra played three songs: ‘So What’ (by Miles Davis), ‘How Great Thou Art’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun/Amazing Grace’.
This was a fantastic opportunity for the children and we are very grateful to our extended musical family: Mr Weitz, Salsa Band leader; Mrs Wright, our choir leader who worked on vocal harmonies; and Mr Bell from the Norfolk Music Hub who taught the children jazz improvisation on the ukulele.
Today we had special performances from Toby and Blossom. Since his last guitar performance, he has passed Grade 1 and is now working on some Grade 2 pieces. Blossom, meanwhile, has been hard at work on the piano and she demonstrated how she likes to sing the notes she is playing on the keys. Finally, Grebes played some jazz ukulele to Miles Davis’s ‘So What’ and Frankie even volunteered to improvise a solo on the spot!
